Construction and Maintenance

On July 16th, USS Missouri set out to engage all opponents upon the Alta Mons Sea. A Reconnaissance Report indicated a substantial minefield (moss) that would restrict Missouri's operational area. While no hostiles were encountered, the day did not proceed without incident.

Missouri was testing out her new more redundant propulsion system, which worked with mixed results: Her starboard engines ran without problem or failure the entire day - marking her first meet that she did not require some form of recovery. Unfortunately, the port motor kept blowing fuses (and still is even on the bench a week later - there is some weird ground short which even took out my multimeter fuse this evening, putting debugging on hold until morning).

First, here is a picture of the new rudder control arrangement. I disassembled everything and added a spacer tube to go between the 1/8" shaft and the hull penetration tube so things operate much more smoothly.  I also put a stainless steel washer at the bottom so that the hull tubes wouldn't dig into the resin of the rudders.  Then, I filed small flats onto the rudder shafts for the set screws to grab.  This provides both a positive grip for the control horns and makes assembly adjusments a non-issue since the screw will force the horn to center on the flat.  I also decided to use ball links for the rudder linkage.  I used some threaded rod (2-56 I believe but I prefer 4-40), Align Trex 600 balls and Quick UK Rocket links.  The Q-UK links are just the nicest I've found and I highly recommend them.  They also come in a variety of colors. 

All in all, it doesn't look all that different but it operates 1000x better than it did.

Last night I received a pair of 12v 6.2Ah and 12v 10Ah SLAs from my friend Cody and both sets seem to be good to go but the 10Ah batteries are a bit big for NC.  The 6.2Ah batteries are the same size as those that are normally marked as 7Ah so they should be an almost direct replacement.  The 10Ah ones are essentially the same dimensions as the 7Ah ones but about an inch wider.  It would have been nice to run on a single 10Ah battery so I could have a spare if needed but I have not figured out how to fit one.  Since receiving the batteries, they were all topped off and m

A few weeks ago, I noticed that my super duper charging cart wasn't rolling around very well.  After some inspections and tests, I discovered that the steel hex bolt axles were moving around in their holes and impacts had caused them to deform the aluminum around them which was allowing the wheels to rub inside their wheel wells.

I have been fiddling with the new Mabuchi motors that I received and so far they look large and promising.  At 7.4v they appear to have similar torque to my geared down Maxons but also appear to be even slower and more precise.  I am disappointed to see that they only have 2 M3 mounting holes as opposed to what seems to be a standard 4 holes.  I am looking forward to making a temporary motor mount and exploring how they perform.   Last night I confirmed that everything