In the fall and winter of 2021, PRCC designed and built our own radio controlled motor boat and took it for three test drives on Lake Carnegie.
Construction
To build the boat, we used stitch-and-glue construction to connect sheets of laser-cut plywood.
We took apart a weed wacker to use as our motor, and machined down the end of its shaft to fit a propellor. We mounted the motor in the boat and built a throttle control. We also built and installed a rudder system to steer the boat.
Testing
We brought the boat to Lake Carnegie and to test various propellor sizes, as well as tweak design elements such as the weight balance and rudder’s range.
We then took it for a spin.