Remote control boat

[Dave]

I have gone off at a tangent this time and I've bought a boat, not one you can sit in, unless your Stuart Little, but one that you can take out on to the boating lake and have fun with.

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

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Now to start gluing the sections together

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The hull sections have now been glued and has set firm.

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The motor and prop shaft has now been fixed in place and the internal face sections are glued in place

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It's now time to fix the upper cabin sections

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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

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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.

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These photos are of it being tested on a lake

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[BriansBrain]

Looks so realistic