I
gave the boat a few runs in the harbour and it handled perfectly and it is really
fast, but it wasn't particularly fun not to be able to control the speed, hence
you can' even go backwards!
| This document is mostly ment for people who are considering buying a radiocontrolled boat |
As I live on a boat I thought it would be convenient to aquire a little model boat - not only to entertain the visting friends, but also to be able to scare some of the anoying ducks and geese away from my little patch in the harbour.
So I went to the local extremely well equipted modelshop here in downtown Bristol. Ideally I wanted a boat with a watercanon which I had seen on the web, because it would naturally be extra festive to spray these little beast with water once they got too used to this newcommer. Unfortunately the shop didn't have any info on this boat, so the best they could do was a fast little racing boat, which anyway looked eurocool, so I bought it.
This was a mistake.
I went home and started assembling it right away. Pretty tricky stuff, like you gotta know what you are doing. Anyway, I got all the way through and I was ready to test the system. I had this nagging feeling that the speed control was on/off kindoff system, which would be really bad, as I wanted primarily to sneak up on the other players in the harbour which I woudn't be able to do with a no-throttle/full-throttle system. And I was right. This was the system that this boat uses. The rediculous thing is that you install quite a powerful (and expensive) radio/servo system, which should be perfectly capable of proportionally throttle control. But no, it just hit's an on/off switch.
I
gave the boat a few runs in the harbour and it handled perfectly and it is really
fast, but it wasn't particularly fun not to be able to control the speed, hence
you can' even go backwards!
So I went back to the model shop and said that I was unhappy about the boat that they'd sold me (they had told me that it had proportional throttle control which they now realized was incorrect).
Anyway to cut a long story short I managed to get them to give me a thingy that now has done the job. And it's excellent.
So is it better than what comes in the Jet Arrow standard package? Definitely. I've taken a photo of the installation and it's just really cool. The little microcomputer sits between the battery and the motor. This means that you can now control the speed of the motor and you can also make it go in reverse (with similar speed control). This is of course much more interesting when sailing the little ship - there really isn't much challenge in a boat that only can go forwards in one speed. What happens if the proppelar gets mangled into some stuff in the water - you are basically screwed.
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Wonder why I am into R/C boats? Well I live on a big boat! What else do I get up to? Well check out my page or see the latest activities on the frontpage |
So is it fun to sail these little buggers? Yeeeah, sort of. It's pretty limited fun in the long run just sailing around on still water, but it is euro-festive when there is a bit of choppy water. Especially festive is it in particular when other real boats pass - then you can sail around then and jump all the surf they create. That's *really* good fun. And I think I'd want to one day take it out in some serious waves - it could really take off then.
Mathias April 2000
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