Hi Stalyoni.
Nice job. Better than swimming for a boat.
But I'm not building a boogieboard air boat as a rescue boat. I've already done that.
This is just purely as an air boat. But a big one.
Here's a link to the one that started it all. Like yours, mine underwent a few transformations too if you read through to the end. Great fun.

http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=845000

Nodd.
Pictures and diagram are great.
As an Aussie, I love your choice of colours.

Cheers.
Paul.

Yeah when I was thinking pure rescue boat I'd considered vectored thrust as an option. Like you discovered, that setup kinda needs turn-fins otherwise she just ends up going sideways. That's a pretty cool rig you have there for sure.

Paint (continued)
Day three of painting I believe. The light green & white are done...



Moving onto the dark green...



And here she is...



The rudders got some fun stripes...



Now that's done I can get back to putting her together...

Looking good!

Don't forget the video on the maiden!

Oh yeah there'll be video, no worries there.

Mounting the Rudders (continued)
The top of the rudders are firmly hinged just behind the motor mount. I also need to secure the rudder bottoms. For that I used a 34¢ piece of aluminum sheeting from Home Depot. I used tin-snips to cut it to shape...



This bolts-up under the main pylon. The piano-wire running down though the rudders indexes two holes in the plate...



To keep the rudders from popping out of the plate I secured the end of the wire with a couple of set-screws. Here's a view underneath before it was mounted...



To link the rudders together so they move as one I bent a short length of piano-wire to bridge the gap...



The mounting hardware is a regular set of Great Planes' control horns. I just snipped 'em off short & drilled a new hole...



And then I took everything apart
Well I thought I was done painting but noooo. For some inexplicable reason I decided she just had to have an orange nose...



Hey watch the paint job!
As with most of my airplanes I found myself taking care, while working on her, to not scratch the paint and then I thought, what the heck am I doing? This is an airboat that'll likely get beat-up running on snow, ice, grass, mud, you name it... watch the paint? So I'm adding "superior durability" polyurethane clear-coat over the entire hull, bottom especially...



That should do it for the paint... I promise. Tomorrow I hope to get the electronics installed.

wonderful
good job !!!

I like the colors nice work.

That is really cool idea with the foam. boat looks great, I was wondering if you could use a cheapo ducted fan like they sell on ebay for the power? Did you use regular auto fiberglass or is that to heavy? Got to try something with foam now. I would have guessed it would fold in half at first hit. Cant wait to see it running, looks fast.

Thanks guys.

Yeah I'm not sure I'd use foam-board for a big honkin' airboat but something smallish like this, it's plenty strong. The internal framework produced a really rigid structure, there's no flexing at all. And for bumps & dings, the fiberglass provides a nice hard surface. She's tough as nails, yet nice & light.

For the hull I used 2oz fiber-glass cloth. The stuff at the auto store is likely a lot heavier but that could be a good thing. To be honest I'm not sure it's all that critical.

I've seen a few ducted fan airboats & they were all slow. You want a big prop with lots of bite for an airboat.

Installing the guts
I dropped in my Chinese-takeout-food-container-radio-box-o-doom. Added lots of silicone to seal her in tight...



Adding bullet connectors to the motor leads...



Time to install the electronics...



I figured I'd keep things simple & just hot-glue in the rudder servo. Well that lasted all of two minutes, she popped right off. So instead I used some foam, scrap aluminum & whatnot to fabricate a proper servo mount...



Roughed up the inside of the food-container & epoxied in the servo mount. In no time I had the rest of the gear secured too. I used double-sided tape for most of the other stuff...



I spent some time programming the radio, getting the gyro setup & testing the throttle...



It floats!
The all important bathtub test. She sits pretty level with the nose raised slightly. The balance point is right around 2/3 from the bow, so she's looking good there...



DONE!
She cruises around my living-room carpet very nicely *grin* I'll take her out this weekend for some test runs. Stay tuned for the video...

Well you've all been waiting for this, so here we go...

Nodd RC - 037 - The Airboat (28 min 24 sec)

Very nice.

How does the gyro work in this case and how did you set that up? I had a catamaran that had a nasty tendency to spin out in turns and this gets me thinking that maybe a gyro could be a solution.

Wow she scoots, and I see you still have liquid water available in CT, in MA it’s not all frozen solid but we aren’t nearly as lucky.

Gyro Setup
I'm using a Detrum GY48V gyro. It's a pretty standard unit, usually used in helicopters but it'll work in anything RC...



Setup is pretty simple, you just hook it up between your receiver & rudder servo...



A nice feature of the GY48V is the remote gain control. It comes with an extra red plug that you insert into an unused channel on your receiver. Map that channel to a switch or the rotary-knob on your transmitter & you can dial in as much or as little stabilization as you like, all while you're driving/flying.

Orientation of the gyro when you install it in the hull is important. This unit only senses a single axis so in the case of a boat you want to orient it so it can sense if the boat turns either left or right (yaw). It doesn't care about rolling from side to side (roll) or rocking back-n-forth (pitch).

This gyro has two modes...

Regular
Counters any yaw movement by turning the rudder in the opposite direction

Head-lock
Turns the rudder either way until its facing the initial direction

For a boat you probably want to use regular mode, that's what I've been using. There's lots of other gyros on the market, for the most-part they all work the same (hookup between with RX & the servo). Some have remote gain control, some don't. Either should work fine.

Originally Posted by cyberhoops

Very nice.

How does the gyro work in this case and how did you set that up? I had a catamaran that had a nasty tendency to spin out in turns and this gets me thinking that maybe a gyro could be a solution.

Depending on how fast the spin happens, a gyro could make it worse since it'll apply opposite rudder which could upset the balance even more depending on how unstable it is by the time the gyro reacts.

Definitely worth a shot if you can get a cheap gyro, but I'd test it on open water first.