Make things do things in a complicated way
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So this ship has lots of features. The original kit intended you to make the crane work, the radars rotate and the towing winches operate.
I looked at how they wanted to achieve these features and didn't really like their approach. Plus, most of the parts were no longer available. Drive motors. I grabbed a couple of 15v motors off Ebay. Turned out to be very nice which was surprising considering they were only £8 each. The hideous brackets the kit supplied for mounting them was just a bit of formed plastic. I designed and printed a proper clamp bulkhead that worked far better. |
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The crane of much fiddling
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The crane was a bit of a fiddle.
The rotation was achieved with a nice, narrow geared motor and a brass worm gear. The rotation limits were set using hall effect sensors on the base and a magnet on the turret. The lifting of the boom was a bit of a nightmare to work out. I ended up using a micro-servo that operates a cam. This cam pulls a tiny steel wire up the hollow centre shaft of the crane and 'pulls' the boom up. Its own weight makes the boom drop back down. The winch is mounted on the base of the ship and the cable runs up the centre of the crane shaft. Not ideal, as it make putting the superstructure on the ship a right fiddle. You will need to 'pay out' a load of crane cable first, before removing the superstructure. I need to address that issue. |
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Towing winches
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I designed the winch platform in CAD and printed off some mounting frames.
The space for these winches is far too small, but I managed to fit them onto the original sliding platform arrangement. These winches incorporate a pair of limit switches on the aft facing side. The winches themselves are some RC Truck winches I had in my workshop (left over from a Lana Del Rey stage show!). |
Smoke machine
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The funnels in the kit just glue to the superstructure. I made them magnetic in two ways. The first magnet hold them to the side of the superstructure. The second is a ring magnet attached to a 3d printed boss. This boss is glued to the end of some clear surgical, latex tubing. The tubing then marries up with a boss within the hull that continues the tubing down to the custom smoke module. The smoke module is 3d printed (what a surprise). It contains a small 40mm fan and a cheap Ebay Vape heater. There is also an optical sensor mounted on one side. This detects the smoke. When the smoke module is called upon, the processor constantly checks that the smoke module is indeed producing smoke. If it is not, then the vape fluid has run out and it turns it off (rather than run the Vape heating element with no fluid). I turns out these little Vape modules produce some serious smoke. The output is PWM controlled and linked to the motor RPMs. |
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Lighting
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I have covered some of this elsewhere, but here is an overview.
The masts were solid in the original kit, so no idea how they expected you to add the supplied bulbs. I bought some new 6v coloured lamps anyway, as I did not trust the battered ones in the kit. I made new masts using brass tubing and 3d printed parts. I wired the lights in very thin wire. The main mast also has a pair of tiny geared motors for the radars. The images here show the masts before finishing. There are covers for the wires and they then need painting. There are also other parts to the masts that get fitted after painting. The ladders were supposed to be brass, but they looked rubbish. I printed some plastic ones. All the lighting is controlled from the transmitter touchscreen. A processor in the superstructure controls the bulbs via transistors. I would usually use Mosfets, but I had these BC549's lying around and they do the job.
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Long way to go yet....
