May 27, 2008

Finishing Up Some Enterprise Work Later Today


After my Calculus test this morning and an afternoon nap (hehe), I will resume some well deserved work on the Enterprise. The paint buildup issue has virtually been fixed. To solve it, instead of building up more paint, I sanded the excess carefully, cleaned the area to get rid of the residue, then I repainted the area, making sure to mask as I did before so the new red blended in with the old- you can't tell the difference because I painted semi-light. There is evidence that dripping occured, but it is so minimal that with weathering I can pass it off as "weathering from the waves".


Last time I was having some issues with fitting the screw shafts (I am going to stop calling them props because props can also be used on airplanes). My issue was that the heat shrink tubing is far too small for the motor shaft, but it is the perfect size for the screw shaft. There are a couple of solutions to this- but I have found that with some encouragement, the motor shafts will fit in there tightly. I can check the quality of the hold by simply running the motors for a bit to see if the heat shrink tears or does something else that it shouldn't. If it behaves I am set- I will just add that area as an area I need to inspect often.


Another issue I had was that although the heat shrink tubing and the motor shaft were turning, the prop was not. This was due to the grease box hole for the shaft not being big enough. I can fix this by reeming the hole slightly larger. I figured the shaft would reem the hole by force, but apparantly they made these brass shafts in mind for frictionless movement- IE these things won't cut very far into styrene plastic so I need to drop the notion that they will. Currently all motors spin clockwise. I need to reverse the polarity on the inside or outside motors to get the others to spin counter-clockwise. This is fundamental and extremely important- if all my motors spin clockwise, the ship will turn to the right and move forward. If two are counter-clockwise, in balance, this will counteract the ship's desire to go left or right (disregarding rudder movement) and it will simply go forward. If I press forward and get reverse, I will simply switch the wires going into the electronics, presto.


Following some shaft fittings I will check the 3rd strut (I broke it off fitting a shaft X___X). It's sitting snug there, but I will keep my eye on it because I am afraid that oscillations traveling down the screw shafts may loosen it over time- in fact when sailing model ships you should always be on the lookout for parts falling off. It is your consequence if they do- and you may have to go swimming! I will paint the black bootline once I can get the shafts installed and ready to go. She is beginning to look like an aircraft carrier.


One more thing: I had a comment by a nice gentleman named Sam. Here is a response incase you don't recheck your comment:

"Hello Sam! The following colors have been used so far:Tamiya German GrayTamiya Mica Red (bottom hull)the rest of the gray is molded color- I usually go back and weather this near the end. Let me know if you have any other questions! (The white for the aircraft tie downs is testors flat white)."


Sam, you can also check out the video series here- Part 2 is on painting.








I have also developed a speaker box system. At first I began engineering it- then came to the conclusion that I am just building a better, American speaker box!

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