Trial #1 Well, it is time to give the boat a try. As expected, the boat list to the side with the flood chamber when standing still. |  |
| Once underway, the boat levels out and drives normally. It looks pretty good on the water. |  |
| At speed, the boat bounces up and down a bit on the water even though the water is nice and smooth. Maybe moving the batteries will fix this, I have read reports that the only thing that corrects this is some trim tabs. |  |
| Turning diameter is only moderate. I think it should turn a bit tighter especially toward the right since the turn fin should help the hull dig in. |  |
| On startup the stock plastic prop cavitates... |  |
| ...it takes a couple of seconds for the boat to get up to speed. |  |
| I wasn't planning on testing the self righting feature of the boat but I managed to flip the boat while fooling around with my camera settings. While at full throttle, I moved the steering from side to side rapidly, this somehow unsettled the boat and caused it to roll over. I don't think the boat is at all unstable, rather, I think I had the ballast way off. |  |
| Anyway, the boat ended up on it's back and did not self right as it should have. I tried hitting the throttle to cause it to roll but it did not work. Crap! After about 10 minutes it did flip back over over and I was able to bring it back in under it's own power. It self righted because water leaked past the hatch tape into the main hatch and the extra ballast was enough to flip it over. |  |
Trial #1 Conclusion I am not going to call this trial a failure as the boat did so some promising performance potential. I was disappointed by the fact that the flood chamber did not cause the boat to self right as it should have. I have no idea if this is fixable. If I was to build this boat over again, I would leave out the flood chamber. Other then the self righting failure, the boat exhibited some poor cornering ability but I think that all of the handling problems can be adjusted out. Unfortunately I did not get a chance to try since the electronics got soaked. | To fix the turning radius, I will move the rudder control rod on the servo arm to add a little bit more throw. I think the hooking problem can be corrected by adjusting the battery location. I am going to add the recommended trim tabs to get rid of the bouncing I noticed when the boat was running. Other then that, I plan on changing the speed controller with another unit because I noticed it was not running smoothly (Gee, another one of my home built speed controllers messing up, imagine that!). |
