I thought I'd share a pic of the first sailing of my recent efforts in plastic.
I'm not completely happy with the model for a few of reasons:
The decks are worryingly awash for much of the time, although the inside stays dry enough. Apparently the full size ship was fairly famous for this. It didn't help that I had my pessimistic brother in law with me repeatedly saying 'bring it back, you're going to lose it..' (Only joking Peter) I guess the very narrow bow means there's not a lot of buoyancy (took me three goes to spell that word) to bring the front up.
Another is that external aerial. I fitted it because I was initially having problems with interference on the rudder servo when the motor ran. I had put in an MFA 457-RE280. (The motor would have been too powerful anyway.) The problems only went away when I fitted a completely different motor. The MFA was fully suppressed and I tried a couple of them. I guess they're just not suitable for 27MHz or I had some bad ones. Once I had fitted the replacement motor the external aerial has no function except to accentuate the lean to Starb'd when the motor runs. I replaced the initial aerial wire with one of half the cross-section and the lean reduced greatly but it's still there.
Finally it's too small on the water, and has no presence when more than ten feet away.
So it's done and it works, but it's not great. :-\
To be fair, none of this is criticism of the original kit, it's about my adaptation of it for R/C. The kit was pretty for for £20, the only slightly duff moldings in my example were a couple of the ships's boats had inappropriate dimpling that needed a smear of filler. There certainly wasn't a lot of flash to trim away from the parts.
My biggest problem now is getting up the enthusiasm to finish of the little extras that I have not got around to, anchors, boats, a couple of the smaller guns etc.
Anyway, the bro' generously brought round a Lindberg Destroyer for me on Christmas day, so I guess the next effort will be a little bigger on the water.
Regards,
Grant.