woke up this morning happy to see all the laquer had set and was ready for installation. i epoxied in all the bases and hooked up all the electronics. soldering the switches i had forgotten previously and then was ready to check functionality. check out the rat's nest
despite the aesthetic ache, all systems were go.
So, i took her out to test all systems installed. like i said, on land, everything was perfect. level switch and sub pump worked nicely, gun pump was ready for battle, and the rudder + motors were a go. so. i took it out to the lake. no deck installed yet, but it didn't matter, i wasn't going to sink from wave washover. so, i headed out to test the boat.
check it out
so. if you couldn't tell.... it sank. with the additional weight of the water in the water tank, the back dropped low enough such that wave washover DID do me in. in all of what, i guess 3 seconds, the whole ship was under. my dad, typical, stopped taking pictures and tried to help, but thankfully bruce (a professional photographer), stayed focus so i could bring to you that video. thank goodness. at least something came out of the sinking. anyways, it sunk, and that was BAD. i took it back to land and tried all systems and got them working again and decided to take it over the dock in the hopes the pier would provide some much needed protection from the waves. so we headed over to the pier.
we decided to just test the driving with all systems in with the exception of the water tank. this being essentially the exact set up as a couple days ago when i had the successful run (after fixing the prop directions) except that there was slightly more weight, i wasn't surprised that the boat drove pretty nicely. see for yourself
however, then the radio receiver started acting up. it was just being finicky. sometimes it'd work, sometimes it wouldn't. we had two theories. the sinking of the boat earlier had completely drowned the hull of water so one explanation was that water got in the system and upset things. alternatively, the finicky-ness seemed to indicate that maybe there was a faulty wire somewhere.
i'm currently letting the boat dry out to try and eliminate one of the two possibilities. plus, i'm cooling off. i was pretty excited and then pretty un-excited. however, its been maybe an hour and i'm somewhat oppimistic. look at it this way.
the only thing that failed was weight. i have a couple of different ways i can fix that. i can figure out a way to change the level at which the level switch triggers the sub pump. i could remove the level switch and make it a rc controlled component like the gun pump is. I don't konw what i'll do, but its not an impossible problem. which is good. also good is the fact that everything worked. the pumps both worked before the sinking, the level switch too. the drive still worked. and so i guess i kinda only have one issue and then i'm all perfect. hopefully.
however, today, i had a sunken battleship
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