I just finished looking at the radio tray for the Victoria and then spending 2 hours to mod it for the servo that I am going to use for the sails (hitec 788bb)
After doing this I was wondering what types of trays others are using. I did look at one one line where the sail servo was attached by the use of beams. Another was just a flat board. Niether one of these descibed how they attached the servo and reciver.
So this is the question (3 parter)
1)How do you build your radio tray
2)How are you attaching the servo and the reciever to the tray.
3)Where do you place your reciever?
Pictures would be cool also
Will
In the picture you just posted it looks like the beams are glued right to the hull. Is that what I am seeing? Wouldn’t the flexing cause the hull to fail eventually? Am I being to cautious? Any time I glue anything to the hull it seems to cause a dimple on the outside.
Yup, it is glued right to the hull. The Fairwind hull is molded ABS plastic and not very thin, so dimpling and flexing is not an issue. I would think the Victoria would be stout enough to handle those sorts of loads as well, but I could be wrong… It looks like most of the Soling 1M servo trays that Greg posted are glued to the hull as well (one or two are integrated into the keel fin box).
For a thinner wall hull like a US1M, you might want to consider some sort of load spreading re-inforcement in that location. I would make sure that the ends of the beams are at least shaped to fit the contour of the hull at that point. Seems to me that you need to attach the tray to the hull somewhere, either through bulkheads or by glueing a large flat tray to a fairly large length of the hull.
Greg and Will and Don
Thanks for the responses.
I was thinking the beam would work if I added a couple of disks to the inside of the hull also. Beam would look lik a set of barbells. And Yes contoured to the hull.
Greg do you have another picture of your set up? ( picture you posted) Cannot see it that clearly is it set on a board only?
OK and hte next question is
the reciever do you leave it loose or are you glueing it/ securing it in the hull?
This may of interest to the “Footie” types and others building really small boats …
Things are so tight in the little “Yankee III” hull that the only mechanically sound option was to use the deck as a kind of inverted radio tray. This enables a small hatch (just big enough to get at the batteries) and lets you test the running rigging on the bench, but has the disadvantage that you had to pull the deck to do any repairs on the radio gear. So the question was: how to seal the deck without having it glued hard to the hull?
After going on The Great Goop Hunt I finally settled on a material called “Stick Tack.” This is a kind of sticky silly putty that never really hardens up. It’s sold as a way of stabilizing displays of knicknacks and so forth. It survived the 24 hour soak test and works very well in practice. So an option for the smaller boats is to just attach everything to the underside of the deck, hold the deck on with enough screws to take the mechanical loads, and seal with Stick Tack.
Another thing I learned from this exercise was the value of a waterway. If you look at most of the J boats, the decks are inset from the sheer by a foot or so. This was done so you didn’t have to caulk at a corner, but rather at a flat joint where the deck overlapped the hull.
Here’s a picture of the “Yankee III” cross-section to illustrate what I mean. The hull is fiberglass-covered foam, the sheer strakes are laminated wood, and deck is 1/32 ply with a 1/16 x 1/8 toe rail for the screws. The black area is the caulk.