I got the battery deck made, and gained a keel compartment underneath it.  I still need to reinforce the false bottom to take the weight of the battery, but that’s no biggie.  Both hull fittings are in place, with the fire monitor system complete up to the pump outlet.  I’m still pondering how to affix the bilge pump to the hull bottom.  

Doesn’t sound like much, but it was a full weekend of boat building.  19 new pix in the build gallery.

Almost done with the basic decking.  I didn’t get the chance to take pix of the fiber glassing on the main deck this evening, but it’s glassed and hardening right now.  I’ll probably start sanding it, and the hatch, tomorrow.  

Next up will be fitting the main deck to the hull, then working on the bulk heads and interior decking.  I’d like to get it in the water soon, but I don’t know if I have enough ballast to get it to the waterline.  At the very least I can test the control systems and drive it around a bit.  I’m sure I’ll get some video of it in the water.

Finished machining the rudder pull-pull wheels and installed the complete rudder control system in the hull.  Using the larger wheels seems to provide a very strong, accurate setup that returns to neutral with little effort.

I got the main deck assembled today.  I still need to finish gluing the members, and I have to make the hatch, but it went together pretty easily after climbing the learning curve with the forcastle deck.  The hatch is going to take some work, since it’s a pretty tight fit (and I haven’t even started glassing it yet), and the kit wood isn’t square on one end.  Meh, it’s all part of building I guess.

I’ll try to get some pix of them before and after I put them in the hull.

First time I’ve run up the drivetrain on the Darby since installing and fiber glassing.  The motor noise in the vid is the twin Pittman motors.  I’m getting close to some sea trials.  I’ll post some pix of the skeg build in the gallery.

I’ve decided to post pictures of the Darby project on Recon. Mostly to keep a photo log of its progress, and to start to bring a non-angry side of me out. Dad and I started this project back the end of last year, and due to some things, work has gone kind of slow. I guess in a way it’s like that Butthole Surfers song “it’s better to regret something ya have done, than to regret something you haven’t done”. But I digress.

When we first started working on it, we were taking a fair number of pix during the build. Since neither of us had much, if any, experience building a fiberglass hull large scale model ship, we went to RCGroups and RCU for some advice and help. That turned into a depressing joke. I don’t know if it’s indicative of that niche, but they had some strange ways. Dad started a thread, and posted a few questions, which didn’t get answered, and most of the posts were at best “ho hum”. I had to literally (no joke) draw a picture of Dad’s question and finally I got a couple replies with the same answer. But threads would blow up on topics that were at best trivial. We soon gave up on the whole forum “community” and the thread got burried quick.

So, I’ve decided to post the build here on recon. I know, it’ll be intersperced with random rantings and obtuse links and pix, but hopefully someone may benefit from the pictures and logs that are sadly missing on the interwebs. I’ve tried to find good build logs for this project, and 99.9% of what I find are sites with a couple “hood open” shots and a beauty shot or two. Not very helpful for beginners.

I posted most all of the pics in the gallery: HERE (which oddly enough is album #69) The ones that are in there now are in no particular order, but future ones should be. I’ll try to post descriptions on the pics as well.

I’m out.

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