Another Puddle Duck Update

Is it still spring?  Well, we'll see.

We decided it was time to build my sail.  Sail number one, is being made of lightweight polytarp. 

Here, Dan is helping spread out the tarp so we can mark it for cutting.  

My sail is triagular, 16' tall, 8' deep.  So we cut out the sail blank with around an extra few inches on each side so we could form this thing.  Just as we finished drawing lines, it started to sprinkle.

Polysail, recommends using carpet tape for assembling sails.  And running a line in the seams to take some of the stresses.  Here, we've finished cutting out the sail, and are laying down reinforced carpet tape.  

The tape was placed centered on the line for the shape of the sail.  Then the line is laid down in the tape. 

Since nobody ever takes pictures of me while boat-building, here's some more of dan helping doing the seam forming on the sail.

So.. the whole sail was completed in one night.  I think it took us three hours start to finish.  We could do another in two hours, especially if we  had a nicer place to do sail layout.  Here's hoping it works.

Moving forward, we started fairing the hull as well.  Here all of the edges have been taped.  And we're about to attack the hull with some mostly microbaloon epoxy to hide all the tape ridges and fill the weave of the tape.

The deck and sides were sanded to knock off the biggest epoxy runs, and to reduce the thickness of the needed skim coat.  This.. is about where we decided these boats were no longer going to be 2-3 year boats, and have turned into 5-10 year boats. 

... quality creep.  Going the wrong way.

The shop is unbelievably dirty, and fiberglass dust doesn't make for good bonding. 

It's really hard to take pictures while buttering up the hull.  Epoxy and cameras just don't get along.  If you look closely, you can see the sheen of the wet ballons and epoxy on the hull.  This was after the first batch of the evening.  The skim coating goes really rather fast, so we can do more than one batch a night.

The second batch covered the sides and bow.  As a side note, that's Dan's boat up on the shelf.  It comes down the next week.

Next week?  Next picture?  same difference.  We flipped my hull over, and while I was out, Dan coated most of the bottom of my hull.  We also got his boat down from the top of the pallet racks. 

That night, we started coating some of Dan's hull too.  More updates soon.  

Fixing more bad ESCs. This time it's vregs.

A couple years ago, my buddy and I built some TT02b's.  In those TT02b's we put some 13.5turn motors with these Turnigy 80amp ESCs.  Both my friend an I were having some rather strange behaviors coming from output voltage to the radios.

The BEC voltage on this ESC is provided by a SOT23 package linear LDO regulator of dubious quality.  Enough, that I decided to try swapping it out.  

The ESC is built as a sandwich, and if you separate the case top and bottom, you can access the control board and the high power boards separately.  I used some silicone servo extension wire to run the three pads from the stock vreg, out to a new TO220 package regulator.  The practical benefit being, that TO220 can dissipate a lot more power, and for $0.80 cents or so, the ESC now has 5amps of 5v power.

I still recommend running a glitch buster on your receiver.  Clean power, and decoupling closer to the ground point that matters more, is always better.  But now this ESC can happily power say... a savox servo with no questions and no brownouts.