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Author Topic: Building a Sea Going Bait Boat  (Read 8964 times)

hedgerowwpete

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Building a Sea Going Bait Boat
« on: February 04, 2012, 05:31:45 pm »

I had a need for a radio controled boat. It needed to be used at sea, easturary, big lake and any where else i felt like it. More to the point it had to go where all other bait boats wont go  conditions wise, salt water wise, under and through water wise and lastly it also had to carry two bricks when doing it. It also has to be self righting and capable of at least 500metres distance control. It had to come in under the £200 mark totaly and completely working. It has to be as hard as nails as I am not a gentle person and realy it had to every thing that every tells you , you cant have or cant be done and all this for my very first radio controlled boat and I also have no experience of building, working or controlling a rc boat or any thing else like it.

So lets start then shall we. We do have a very steep learning curve to climb and rapidly it steepens.

The design starts with the AQUA CAT DINGLE BERRY as a sea going bait boat and one of the many carp fishing bait boats.
I have decided on a simple yatch hull idea  with a single keel .
A lump of lead in the bottom and a lower water line  a wide body and maybe a float on the top for good measure as a self righting aid.


So with the general plan out lined and no drawings what so ever, we start work.  First up is the size of the boat to be made. We will go with the simple three foot by one foot square ish as a starting point. The main reason for this is ithe foan insulation celotex sheet we are using will allow two of the these sizes plus an off cut for the keel.

next up is the local tip of an abandoned house.


So thats the supplies started with and a cost of zero so far apart from a walk out. Also my first mistake, I should have dried the sheet before starting work with it as it is wet and damp in places that prevent the glue from working to stick the pieces together when we try to glue it so we ended up using bambo barbeque sticks to hold every thing together. When we start to cut and shape into our hull. Now some of you reading this do if you dont mind me saying so . Do have a slight tendency towards being some what precise with your works. To a beginer like me it is the last thing I want to do is work to these tolereences not do I want someone like you to help me as it would drive us both nuts, me wanting to get one and you lot tring to make the female mould to within three thou of the calculated drawings, I want a working toy not a piece of art work. Sorry.

So next up is we now attack the foam body  with our newly aquired tools , a surform, flat file single parent cut and we also needed round rough things but with no money and no idea we went for glue on round plastic pipe off cuts and sand paper sheets. We also had the wifes bread knife and a rusty wood saw aswell.

 

so what we ended up with is totaly cut by eye and no tape measure was harmed in the making of this hull.






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hedgerowwpete

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Re: Building a Sea Going Bait Boat
« Reply #1 on: February 04, 2012, 06:23:22 pm »

Next up is a couple of coats of white emulsion, to help the eyes judge its size and shapes and a few attacks with the sand paper again and we are ready for the fibreglass. The costly stuff. I brought a 5kilo bucket of fibre glass from fleabay and with a ten pound delivery fee from Belfast we are hit with a massive £35 bill. I know its a heady cost, but this boat is about to get even more expencive as I also buy a box of fibreglass off cuts for another tenner but this time i go and collect it. Yes I know £45 for a whole bespoke hull its outragously expencive, but some times my wallet runs away with my great ideas. So fourty notes less we start the fibre glassing. This is when we now discuss the many layers and techniques and weights of fabrics etc. Or we stick two layers of the course fluffy stuff on the foam hull followed by another two layers of the tissue paper fully stuff, before the stinky stuff goes jelly like or I start to float around the greenhouse without the aid of wings. PLEASE NOTE THESE TECHICAL TERMS MAY CONFUSE SOME PEOPLE WITH A LESS TECHNICHAL BRAIN, lol

 

You will notice that the fibreglass stinky stuff has moulded its self to the hull foam core perfectly and you can see that I spent hours of hard work afterwards sanding little humps and ridges into the perfectly smoth fibreglass!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You can also see that the keel has a tube like design on the bottom of it. I have absolutly no reason why they have a tube like thingy on the base of the keel but if its goodenough for Dame Ellen McAurther its good enough for me.

What we now need to sort out is the top half which is going to house two bait/lead delivery tubes on the stern.
 
These were formed by sticking sand paper to one of the said delivery tubes and sanding away the unwanted foam and fibrglass untill it looked sort of right.

We will eventualy have the whole of the stern and the tubes fibreglassed in place. For now we have  two slight problems at the moment. One is I cant afford any more fibreglass resin and secondly I have no idea how to make the release catchs for the tubes using servos and bits of bent wire?

Once the fibreglass stopped being stinky, we when removed basicly every thing inside the hull , foam wise except for the two ends, the bow is for anti sinking and the stern because Ii am yet to afford the servos to then play with untill I get the bait tubes to work  and all the mounting brackets in place ect.


So this is the sern tube area for the prop I am looking at swinging a 50mm to start may be even bigger. We are looking more for power than speed . she is to get through the first three breakers then its easy going after that.
We can also stick a piece of wood to the inside end of the round keel tube before adding the steel bars for ballest weights  and give the rudder something to hold onto and i do like the idea of a tube rudder. With this area we also had four layers of rough fully stuff and three layers of tissue papper fully stuff as reinforcement to this arearather than two.


This is the bow with the floatation foam core, lol. please note I have left a section of celotex foam on all sides about two inchs square, this is because i shall cut a section 35mm square in it all the way around the outside edge of the fibreglass hull and fill it with timber and fibre resin and talc and of course fluffy stuff to strenghen the sides. As the top will consist of a single sheet of flat perspex sheet ten mm thick and bolted/screwed into the timber batton all the way round so she is waterproof to go through waves as well as over them.

  

again the stern section with the cavernous room to fit all the nice elctonics and servos and motors, none of your fiddly stuff here if i cant get two hands in then i ant intrested in doing it. we might also be using an old windscreen wiper motor and to be safe opted for more room, To flaten the whole  top for the lid to fit after we have cast the timber batton we intend to stick several pieces of sand paper to an old piece of thick glass and to sand paper the whole hull in one go.

Thats it for now the servos and electrric motors are going to get fitted very soon . just as soon as i can afford to go over to Brierley Hill and the local  model shop to buy the spektrum 5  2gig set up for a ton he has sorted out for me.
But untill the hull is finished to the state where , when i take it in we can try placing where we want to stick servos and the like.

To the many fisherman out there like me who want to build your own bait boat, yes there are lots of hulls to buy and kits to make and the like. All of them are totaly fantastic and perfect for you. Where as i have a bait boat able to take at least two,  one kilo loads, ( estimated to be able to do a single three kilo load as well)  out past most peoples ideas of sanity and  so far a cost of £45 for fibreglass inc postage and a cocntrol kit set of another £100. yes its cheaper to buy them on fleabay but, no where near as helpfull as my local model shop dealer, who will not only sell me the set, but painstakingly, slowly explain, in small simple words of less than two sillibles and will have to do it several times before i understand what he is talking about, that part is priceless and well worth the extra quids of going to the shop.

pete

ho forgot to say the when i first started we wanted this to be  a petrol powerd version, It  is also being built at the exact same time as this electric motored version, but we are making a better job of it rather than the more less refind version here,
 enjoy pete
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Netleyned

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Re: Building a Sea Going Bait Boat
« Reply #2 on: February 05, 2012, 03:25:22 pm »

Keep it coming Pete
I reckon your going in the right direction.
Smethwick's answer to Krishna  :-)) :-))

Ned
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john s 2

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Re: Building a Sea Going Bait Boat
« Reply #3 on: February 05, 2012, 04:39:57 pm »

Pete. Its interesting to read your build. Please continue it when you can. Youre certainly able to do more tnan me. I hope it all goes well for you. Thanks John.
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MikeA

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Re: Building a Sea Going Bait Boat
« Reply #4 on: February 06, 2012, 11:00:11 am »

hi pete its good to see you are back on the forum. Im not sure about something though, are these posts the current progress or recaps if you like. One of the pictures youve posted of the foam hull was posted by you in november:

http://www.modelboatmayhem.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=33917.msg336724#msg336724

did you find an engine?
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hedgerowwpete

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Re: Building a Sea Going Bait Boat
« Reply #5 on: February 06, 2012, 10:28:17 pm »

i am writing up the making of the new boat which is going to be electric for this forum.

we cut two hulls from the sheet of celotex we found, the first one you have seen is the one we turned into the IC version, which is parc realy realy parc the whole lot has got to be redone, i lost my temper with on a beach in late  january 2012 and then had to carry all four pices of it back to the car, the problem was down to the control systems we were using, it was a second hand 42 kh set up and we were using second hand servos etc and the lot worked well in the house on the test bed but, it  was to slow or to intermitant when working on a storm beach.  it was not instant enough .the engine was gear boxed in the end, we had a two to one drop so we had more grunt when we wanted when it was swinging a 75mm prop. everyones concerns was with the water ingress but that was easy to solve, we just copied what the big boys use

this one we are going to use brand new electronics and 2.2.gig system and we are going to make the poor sod who runs the briely hill model shop go gray with seeing me turn up with the boat under the arm.

and no i am not really back, someone asked in the other threads if they could see what we were up to, and there are many others like me who want a bait boat but for under the hundred quid mark and i am a great beliver in giving others the chances to learn from my own experiences and mistakes.

in away to me model boats are not toys or a hobby, its a means to an end, thats all and once i have up loaded the construction plans over the next few months an posted as much details with the mistakes etc thats about it for me, i do keep popping back to the forum over the last few months to research ideas and threads but i dont normaly bother signing in as its only a specific thing i am looking for and if i cant find it i go else where, i find the aero forums suit me better as they do understand the  distence problems with the hand sets, if i need some detail in regarding the actual boat i try here.


its more personality wise , its not my sort of forum and no matter what, i will never quite fit in here, i am much better off standing outside looking in through the window, its safer as i dont stomp on to many toes that way , lol
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MikeA

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Re: Building a Sea Going Bait Boat
« Reply #6 on: February 07, 2012, 08:35:49 am »

i cant understand why you still hold a grudge?? nobody turned you away.

When we start to plan our builds we have to weigh up all possibilites but most most importantly prepare for worse case scenarios. IC and electric both have their pros and cons and some of us (me for one) felt that the pros of electric outweighed the pros of IC, especially for the criteria to which your boat was to be built. There are IC boats on here and electric ones:

current ic build:
http://www.modelboatmayhem.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=33188.0

what did you do to over come the water ingress then?
Im not sure what happened to the radio, same thing happended to me on 27mhz, worked fine in the house wasnt interested at the lake. I Think it was bad batteries you know. did you extend the antennas?


another thing why are you making this one electric if you got the ic to work then use that and post that up.
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hedgerowwpete

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Re: Building a Sea Going Bait Boat
« Reply #7 on: February 16, 2012, 06:57:17 pm »

So here we go the next list of mistakes and muck ups as well as moving slightly further forward as well as backwards.

so for the  side of the boat we cut out two troughs each one is 35mm square and had a splat of resin and two layers of fibreglass mesh inserted and then the stick of ceder cut to 30 mm square and then more resin and fibreglass mesh to bed it in place, the idea is that the lid can now be screwed to the sides and it also stiffens up the boat sides to. one of the problems with celotex and thin skin fibreglass is that the fibres glass on its own is very fragile but the foam makes it rock hard. so when we dug out the inside of the boat we made room for all the controlls and also softend every thing in the middle up, what we should have done is four layers of fibreglass and made the hull around 2 to 3mm thick rather than nearer one.

this is the one side capped off ready to be leveled up and sanded flat again


we have also glassed in place the two ceder bulk heads one stern and one bow. this is the forward one, the black box marked out is an idea to fit a small plastic box into the front , so if we need to we could add further weight , but thats an idea of the bait boat part  fourteen,

the next muck is the bait delivery tubes, we found a metre of 68mm guttering down pipe and though this is perfect for what i need and from the photo you can see that the smaller white tube does look the part almost reward facing torpedo tubes what i did not think of was that i have just brought a new lead mould for making sea weight with, this unfortunately does not fit


so we have gone up insize to 110mm drainage pipe , the brown one, plenty of room now for us





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hedgerowwpete

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Re: Building a Sea Going Bait Boat
« Reply #8 on: February 16, 2012, 07:15:14 pm »

right  then next problem we had was the inside of the celotec foam was getting badly dented by me when working on the boat so when we were glassing the top edges we also put one skin of fibreglass mesh and one skin of tissue mesh onto the inside as well as the bulkheads.

the next part was to take the whole lot over to the local model shop to get the bits we will start to need so , shopping time,


I wont say were i went in brieley hill as i dont want to advertise and i am sure many of you either have the bits at home, or know where to get them for the price of pence rather than my pounds.

so what did we get
a 50mm prop made from plastic £2
300mm ,4mm prop shaft £10
extra large rudder £4.90

servos next one rated at 9kg for the rudder £10 and one for the test bed rack for the tube release mech which was £2.80 plus another £1 for the plastic bits so i can connect it to the levers so about £30 in bits and we still have not brough t the hand set and some other bits, if i knew what i was looking at i could proberly get them from ebay for pennies but i dont so i need the shop owners brains and skills and that was worth it

the one part we did not buy was the electric motors, we did look at what was availible at the shop and in the catalogues but once you get past £30 it starts to get out of my price range and we were looking at motors well past the £100 mark when you start to look at the size of this boat . so we went for the 12 volt electric motor, i was told by the shop owner to aim for a car electric windscreen wiper motor but instead on the way home i found what was left of a kids electric scooter and i am going to try it out for size instead


acooreding to the motor we have a 24 volt dc 120 w motor so it might or might not be what we want but it was free so we will play with it it also comes with a twist grip speed controlller which means i might not need an expencive speed controller to be supplied from the shop  all i should have to do is connect a servo to the twist grip device and use that as it is

next up is how to prevent a roll over when she is finished so as well as a lump of lead in her keal we will also have a foam ball a foot of the deck, and who know how to make one, so lets try a kids ballon and some squirty foam , the daft thing is once you squirt the foam in you have to let some of the gasses its proppelled with out or you have a half filled ballon, but it does work well
the strange thing was when it went hard i was thinking if i popped the ballon it would fall away but the foam has stuck to the latex and its become hard, so the ballons are still covered with vynal. lol
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hedgerowwpete

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Re: Building a Sea Going Bait Boat
« Reply #9 on: February 16, 2012, 07:20:49 pm »

now i just have a lot of logistics and posisioning on gizmos to fit now, silly brackets and finger less fixings  and many many trial and gear fitting to make every thing work , i will update you later when i get it sorted out and some where near , we have also a few experiments to trial the release catches as well
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