Posted Tue, 06/07/2011 - 18:54 by Brian
I finally got around to cutting all of the extra material off of the backs of the barrel bends. I took some friendly ribbing at last month's meet when someone observed that the manufacturing marks read as '666' on the back of one of the turrets. What can I say? Nassau is a beast of a boat? 
The process is not rocket science - actually it is an old wood working technique.
Posted Thu, 06/02/2011 - 18:37 by Brian
Drew has been trying to sell me on the idea of LiFePO4 cells for a while... has have Stephen and Keri... and it looks like they are about the only thing that is going to fit. Tonight I cut some dowels to the size LiFePO4 18650 cells to see what fit where. As I posted earlier I thought the 18650 cells would be the best fit. However, when I started trying to fit cells in the ship it was hard to get an eight cell (4s2p) pack to fit anywhere. No matter how I laid out the pack the cells were just barely interfering with rotation or touching the CO2 bottle.
Posted Mon, 05/30/2011 - 13:34 by Brian
Holy <bleep>ing <bleep> is space tight in Nassau... I knew batteries were going to be tough but this is nuts... Last meet's discovery that Nassau basically needs to run at 12 VDC to get to speed was a major blow. It basically knocked out any possibility of using sealed lead acid batteries (SLAs).
Posted Sun, 04/03/2011 - 19:30 by Brian
I spent the afternoon finishing up the magazines and associated hardware (barrel risers, feed tubes, bottoms of barrel bends). Because of the difficulty in making discs in Lexan I drilled all the holes for the magazine covers using a rotary table. This post shows what I did.
Posted Wed, 03/30/2011 - 18:08 by Brian
After some trial and error I finally found a way to reliably cut Lexan discs on a hole saw. So I finally have the raw disks for Nassau's magazine covers. The trick is to use a block of wood to both guide the hole saw and clamp the Lexan. This keeps the hole saw from shaking on the mandrel and very securely clamps the Lexan in place. The other thing is to not try and do this on a $40 Harbor Freight drill press... its spindle and chuck simply can't handle the torque needed. So I did all the drilling on the mill with the gear box dropped into low.
Posted Sun, 03/27/2011 - 12:28 by Brian
This weekend I knocked out some of the remaining high precision pieces for Nassau's cannons: the machined barrel bends. Nassau's small size and my insistence on keeping things as close to scale as possible required something with a tighter bend than transitional barrels. Last year I experimented with other ways to support depression using machined barrel bends. Experimentation showed that the machine bends were at least as efficient as traditional barrels. So this weekend I started making the parts to be installed in Nassau.
Posted Mon, 03/21/2011 - 17:03 by Brian
I've not been good about posting when I am working on things. I thought I would write a quick post to talk about what [little] has been done on Nassau since a got Nassau floating a few weeks ago.
This post talks about the workshop upgrades working towards a dedicated shop, new magazine walls for Nassau, and starting work on the machined barrel bends for Nassau.
Posted Mon, 02/21/2011 - 20:33 by Brian
Yesterday I finished painting Nassau so when I got back from a business trip tonight I quickly tossed the gun tray in to see how overweight the little ship was. I fully expected that the ship would already settle at or a little below the scale waterline - at least in the stern. As you can see in the picture I was very wrong! The ship still has several pounds of buoyancy before reaching the scale waterline. YAY!
Posted Sun, 02/20/2011 - 11:22 by Brian
This weekend I silkspanned and painted Nassau's hull. Sorry, but I am not going to take step by step pictures for these activities. Silkspaning is fast, wet work that I didn't want a camera around... and if you don't understand how to paint then you should probably not be building a ship! 
However, I did include a few tips (including low odor dope replacement) and some pictures of the hull after it is finished.
Posted Sun, 02/20/2011 - 10:49 by Brian
The ships I had owned or worked on previously were all treaty-era or WWII battleships which lacked casemates or other hull crenelations. Unfortunately they are a prominent feature on my 1908 battleship Nassau. However, I wanted them to register dents and seamlessly blend with the deck. So I need to skin them. The good news is that our rules don't require they be penetrable.The bad news is that their curves are too severe to simple bend if 1/32" balsa around them. This article shows how I solved the problem.