This is an abridged build thread - because I am usually too impatient to stop and take photographs. This is one of Vladimir's Scale Ships Akula and it is a beauty. It comes with all kinds of goodies and is a joy to work on.
PK. So it arrived and I went ballistic on its arse and by the time I got my head up it looked like this.
I started with a large bit of ply and glued some 120 grit sand paper to it. That allowed me to get a good fit between the upper and lower hull pieces. Then a bit of Dremeling and, vola, le "Z" cut was complete. The bow was filled and sanded and then it looked like this.
I ditched the (5mm) stern tube and shaft that came with the kit because it was HUGE and replaced it with a much more usable 4mm version with some really nice self lubricating bearings that came from Engel in Germany. Although the upper and lower hull halves went together quite well the profile of the rear extension was wrong and needed some quite aggressive sanding to get it looking right.
Fat - in all the wrong places.
Looking better
And, finally the right shape.
This photo also shows the bearings for the stern planes. The kit comes with very accurate appendages which are precisely drilled and therefore quite tight. The shafts are all 3mm and produced quite a bit of binding until I ran a 3.2mm bit thought them to loosen everything up. I did the laser alignment thing to get everything square, drilled the holes oversize and epoxied some bearings into the holes. Then made some simple bell cranks and hooked it all up like this.
I fixed the appendages with super glue and then drilled them to fix some 2mm rod for added strength. Seemed to work OK. The bell crank was initially designed to allow both upper and lower rudder to work in tandem without having to mate them way back in the stern tube but, it produced an unintended benefit by allowing me to lengthen the arm and get a (slight) torque advantage in the linkage. It also brought the end of the pushrods inline with the SD outputs.
PK. So it arrived and I went ballistic on its arse and by the time I got my head up it looked like this.
I started with a large bit of ply and glued some 120 grit sand paper to it. That allowed me to get a good fit between the upper and lower hull pieces. Then a bit of Dremeling and, vola, le "Z" cut was complete. The bow was filled and sanded and then it looked like this.
I ditched the (5mm) stern tube and shaft that came with the kit because it was HUGE and replaced it with a much more usable 4mm version with some really nice self lubricating bearings that came from Engel in Germany. Although the upper and lower hull halves went together quite well the profile of the rear extension was wrong and needed some quite aggressive sanding to get it looking right.
Fat - in all the wrong places.
Looking better
And, finally the right shape.
This photo also shows the bearings for the stern planes. The kit comes with very accurate appendages which are precisely drilled and therefore quite tight. The shafts are all 3mm and produced quite a bit of binding until I ran a 3.2mm bit thought them to loosen everything up. I did the laser alignment thing to get everything square, drilled the holes oversize and epoxied some bearings into the holes. Then made some simple bell cranks and hooked it all up like this.
I fixed the appendages with super glue and then drilled them to fix some 2mm rod for added strength. Seemed to work OK. The bell crank was initially designed to allow both upper and lower rudder to work in tandem without having to mate them way back in the stern tube but, it produced an unintended benefit by allowing me to lengthen the arm and get a (slight) torque advantage in the linkage. It also brought the end of the pushrods inline with the SD outputs.
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