I'm sure some people here must be familiar with the "Dickie" RTR tugboat (now sold as the "Seaport Work Boat"). I bought one of these a couple of weeks ago, intending to eventually rebuild it (with a scratchbuilt superstructure) as an earlier type diesel tug.
Anyway, I've tried out the boat a few times on local ponds + a neighbour's swimming pool, and whilst it runs quite well and is very "seaworthy" (absolutely no water got on the deck when running) there appears to be a serious problem with the steering, in that the rudder/Kort nozzle only moves half as far to the left as it does to the right. This means that when steering in this direction the boat has a huge turning circle and will usually run into the side of the pond before it has turned even 90 degrees, let alone 180'.
I took the boat apart to look at the servo and rudder mechanism, and I can't see any problem with it - the mechanism, and the rudder/nozzle, can be pushed by hand all the way in either direction, it is only when operating the servo that it doesn't move fully to the left. There is a "trim adjuster" for the rudder, operated with a screwdriver, but adjusting this does not have much effect on the steering of the boat.
I took the boat back to the shop today (Howes, near Oxford), and, although they offered to replace it, I first tried out two other examples of the same boat that they had in stock - both of them had EXACTLY the same problem. Hence it appears that it's either a design fault of this particular model of RTR boat, or a problem with all the boats in the batch that Howes received. So I thanked them for their help and took my own boat back with me - there wasn't much point swapping it for another with the same problem.
Could anyone help me with this - have any other owners of this boat had the same problem, and if so, how did you fix it?