I cannot believe how difficult it is to find the right jet drives.
There are some famous Manufacturers in Germany from whom they can be got but supply is a real issue and price is very high.
Anyway, the Shannon class lifeboat has two of course and since its useless without them I thought I would source them and put them in the kit. (If you've got to buy them from somebody, might as well be me).
Suppling them of course makes it easier for the builder too.
Anyway they are too unreliable in terms of supply, far to expensive and don't really fit properly. They have weird reversing buckets and look nothing like the real thing.
So I am making my own and so far they look fine.
There are lots of designs and all appear to work to some degree. I dived in at the deep end using 123D design and came up with a design I thought looked OK. Over the last few weeks I have been developing the design and have just finished 3D printing everything so next week I will build one to test it out. It will have a tough ABS impeller but I don't really expect it to live very long so if the design works, Simon at the Prop-Shop will be making the impeller.
If it works I'll scale it all down by 25% and see how the 1/16th one works.
At our model boat meeting last Thursday night a number of people were interested in these for other projects but I have no plans to sell these other than with my kits.
I might do some bow thrusters instead of using the Raboesch ones in my kits and if I do, these will be for general sale. Does anyone have a good source of supply for small bevel gear sets?
Author
Topic: Jet drive for the Shannon (Read 6121 times)