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| Electric boat in action. |
Today, we turned a toy aeroplane that did not work very well into a cool motor boat. Well, we didn't turn the aeroplane into a boat, but we did use the motor and the propeller from the plane.
The aeroplane we used was supposed to be suspended from the ceiling from a bit of string and switched on. The propeller at the back pushed the plane forward and it was supposed to go around in circles. The only problem was that it didn't. The plane was too heavy and the propeller was too small, so it never really worked.
I used a screwdriver to carefully remove the four screws that held the plane together. Once the screws were out, the motor and the propeller came out quite easily, and we put the whole plane together again so we can still play with it.
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| Wire insulation as a shaft coupling. |
Next we tested the motor and the switch. All was in working order, but there were two problems. We got the wires the wrong way around, which means our boat would have gone backwards, but that one was easy to fix. The second problem was that the motor shaft and the propeller shaft were linked by a short bit of plastic tubing. The tube was a little too short, and kept on slipping off the shafts, so we needed a new bit of tubing. We found that the insulation on an extension lead was exactly the right size, and made a nice snug fit.
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| Prestik holding motor and batteries. |
Next we took a polystyrene food tray and made a small hole for the propeller shaft. We needed the motor to be at an angle, and a large blob of prestik did a very good job. The prestik also held the battery pack and the switch in place.
We cut a rudder from a bit of aluminum pie plate, and wrapped it around a tooth pick. We set this off to one side so that it would not foul the propeller and we were ready for a test run.
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| Wine cork buoy. |
The boat performed beautifully and zoomed across the swimming pool. Euan made some buoys out of corks. He put a screw into the bottom of half a wine bottle cork and a tooth pick into the top. To finish it off he put an aluminum flag on top of the tooth pick. The buoys were ready and worked really well.
The final bit of fun was trying to set the rudder so that the boat zoomed between the buoys.
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| General layout. |
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| Propeller and rudder. |
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All of the pictures are
here.
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