Hi Guys,
Well yesterday my two Seaport's arrived from Howes!
After looking at the builds on here I started to notice a few subtle differences in the "new batch" that suggest even the poor little Seaport has been hit by hard times.
First thing I noticed was the ballast tank holes on the bottom of the hull. On previous versions these have been sunken in mesh covered ports (see pic from Martin
HERE ) Now they are just a few, not very well, perforated holes in the thinner plastic hull.
As such I'm not sure the boat would be usable with them, as they are so unevenly perforated that one side fills up far quicker than the other leading to a rather alarming list when putting it in the water - thankfully of course it DOES make the holes easier to fill in! But due to the plastic being a lot thinner under that tank, it may need some re-inforcing.
The wiring is obviously quite significantly shorter than before, if you unscrew the wheelhouse there is barely enough slack to allow you to lift it up more than about 1.5 Inches. I had to unscrew the main deck and cut the wires from in there, to allow enough movement to see the radio tray.
The tray itself is no longer in a waterproof plastic container, it is just sitting on the deck, when I used the boat in the home test tank for the first time, and tried the fire monitors, the pipe connector between the mast and the wheelhouse popped off, which leaked all the water supposed to go up into the monitor, straight allover the radio board.
A few other points:
There is no longer any buoyancy foam/styrene in the hull
The ballast tank is now epoxied in rather than screwed in
There were only 5 fenders on each side rather than 6
In 5 different places screws had been left out
Another thing which is probably a saving but actually will probably help increase performance:
The Kort nozzle is at least a couple of mil smaller in diameter, as such there are no longer any "stops" (See
pic of original with stops) AND the prop is a much snugger fit in the nozzle itself.
Out of the box it now runs really high at the stern, even with the ballast tanks full, the tip of the prop is out of the water, on closer inspection this seems to be because there's a large weight now put in the bow, wrapped in brown packing tape. If this were moved to the centre of the boat it might sort it out.
I'm not moaning or complaining about any of these points because of course we don't buy these models to leave them stock, its just a few points that are worth noting. Especially if you intend to run it without too many changes.
I'm loving the build so far, Planning on wet n' drying the hull today, then priming. Not sure why but just working on this thing brings a grin to my face!
Alex