Post by: Dave on July 03, 2016, 11:49:31 AM
It comes as a kit that is laser cut and then you have to glue all the parts together, that's easy I hear you say, well I got news for you because it's not as easy as it seems. Having the right clamps is the first thing you need and plenty of them as you'll see in the photos below, a large roll of masking tape will help too.
Second thing you need is patience, as you have to glue sections then walk away for a day, although the glue pot says dry in 5 minutes, the tension in some of the hull sections need to be left for longer than that to enable the glue to set hard so they don't spring apart again.
Here are some of the pieces once taken out of the cutting sheet
Now to start gluing the sections together
The hull sections have now been glued and has set firm.
The motor and prop shaft has now been fixed in place and the internal face sections are glued in place
It's now time to fix the upper cabin sections
With the internal decking having the seating added and the steering wheel and details done it's now time to prepare for the finishing sealer and top coats
This is where things started to go pear shaped. I bought some sander sealer as indicated by the instructions and proceeded to seal the whole boat. That was fine no issues. The it says to 'apply lacquer' so again I bought some lacquer and applied that, but even thought the lacquer was 90% sheen the finish came out all bitty. The sheen was not even all over the boat even after 3 coats of lacquer.
So I got the Dremel out and sanded down the lacquer, once I had done that I applied some external quality Ronseal varnish. Even this didn't bring up to the finish I was hoping for but I couldn't keep coating it and rubbing it down so I got some Pledge furniture polish out and gave it a good coating of that.
So here are some photos of the finish boat out of the water.
Photo on the lake in the next post
Post by: Dave on July 08, 2016, 07:43:12 PM
Post by: Choppa on July 12, 2016, 07:01:45 PM
Later on, as a teenager, I had a go at building my own but never managed to finish it off. Probably the wrong time of my life to be committed :whistle
Later on in life after a marriage and two kids, I had a go with a fast electric-powered jobbie for my elder lad. That did manage to sail but only once or twice and is now on a shelf, gathering dust. And it did EAT batteries.
Nice job Dave. You should be well proud of that. If you look very closely at the pictures of it sailing on the lake, you might just about be able to see Stuart Little at the helm :yes
Post by: Dave on July 13, 2016, 05:38:37 PM
Its an odd thing but I couldn't get excited about taking it to the lake to test it, in fact once I had run it around a bit and the wife had taken the photos I just wanted to leave, forgive the pun but it didn't float my boat at all. The best bit for me was building it which as you can read was very testing at times but the end product I'm quite pleased with.
The wife is going to take it to school and raffle it to raise money for cancer reserarch.
So hopefully they'll get a nice pot for it.