Hello fellow sailboaters!
As the building was done and the water still liquid, today was my and my boat’s maidentrip in windpowered RC.
After a few testruns and adjusting, the boat sailed fine, it lookes nice on the water with an impressive “dent” midships, when at hullspeed.
In view of the price (about a third of a competition One Meter), the Thunder Tiger Chinese have done a rather good job.
The hatch is waterproof, when you use six instead of four clamps and use a liberal amount of closed-cell foam on both deck an hatch, what comes with the kit is insufficient.
Too bad the cockpit aerea with two steering wheels and winches floods, when the boat heels a bit, I’ll make a drain for it.
The rudderblade seems a bit small/short with it’s 5" length, but that could be my poor sailing skills aswell.
My eight kg servo was not strong enough to pull in the sails under load, you have to anticipate that when sailing, as I found out…
Seems a winch is in order.
For whatever reason the mainsail is supposed to slide over the mast, surfsail-style, and the spreaders and other lines being stuck through the fabric, making it impossible to ever remove the sail without having to re-rigg the mast completely.
Also the suggested rigging of the spreaders was not very practical, I altered it into a diamond rigging, making the mast very stiff.
I’ve fixed the mainsail in a more traditional way with a line in the sail and rings around the tapered carbon fibre mast.
I had my doubts on the plastic fixing points for the rigging on deck, but welding them in place with Ethyl-Acetate, made them strong enough to lift the boat by it’s mast tip without doing damage…
The mainsail boom had a simple ring around the mast, which would bind the moving rather a lot, as all other lines were supposed to be knotted onto it.
I replaced it with a ball & socket for both boom and boomvang, soldered from some brass strip, works like a charm.
The only downside are the flat nylon sails, if only they had been flat, but due to the material used, they have bags and folds that don’t contribute to an efficient sail.
I had to thread the trailing edge with a thin Dyneema line and tighten this a bit to keep it from flappig frantically, needless to say, it has a slight scoop now…
The jib is marginally better, probably because it’s smaller.
I’ve been sailing and setting-up the rigg for an hour and a half today, and got it as good as it gets, before my fingers got too stiff (close to freezing overhere) to get the knots untied.
As it turned out, the sails stretch substantually under load, so the bagginess got progressively worse, I adjusted, till I had no more room to adjust and the jib-boom was on the deck…
After returning home, the nylon shrunk back to it’s previous shape, making the main boom curve up under the stress.
I’ll have to break out the sewing machine one of these days, to make some decent sails out of ripstop spinaker nylon.
I purchased the boat through an Internet shop, after comparing prices at eBay, no problems, swift delivery.
As it was my first kit sailboat, I took my time to study the building guide, in order to avoid obvious mistakes.
The building/assembling is fairly straight forward, thinking ahead before glueing things always helps.
They must have different servo dimensions in China, because the standard ones, I wanted to use did not fit by a longshot.
I made two servo plates from ABS sheet, and glued them on top of the servo bays, ready.
I had my shot of modelbuilding for this model ( I usually build from scratch)
Being my first RC sailboat, the set-up of the rigging and the sheeting of the sails had me puzzled for a while, but I managed to get it working.
Made a couple of brass fairleads for the main and jib sheets, just a hole in the ABS deck didnt look right to me.
I also added a little block for the mainsail sheet on the sailarm, instead of running it through the hole in the plastic.
Now I’m waiting for the weather to get better…
Man, my boating addiction has just gotten worse…!
Regards, Jan.
Boaters are nice people.
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