Building An R/C KILO, part-1

I've played hooky the last week. Instead of working on the VANGUARD and other jobs, I broke out that neat little 1/144 Trumpeter KILO kit and started working it into a practical r/c submarine. This of course necessitated the development of a specialized WTC and slight structural changes and enhancements to the basic kit. The next few e-mails will chronicle the work to date.

Though the KILO -- joining the other 'big' scale plastic kits coming from Trumpeter, Revell, and Dragon -- is a typical static scale injection kit, it is just big enough to fit all the gizmo's needed to r/c the thing. A delightful challenge.

The following chronicles the work done to date -- and yes Erich, Jonathan, and Frank, I'm getting back to your projects right away, thanks for being patient with me.

I'll include video of this project with the next Video Cabal Report, #6. That DVD should go out by the end of the month.

Well, just how small is this little 1/144 KILO kit? Well, take a look! Sitting between the upper and lower hull halves is the smallest commercially available WTC we produce, the three-inch diameter WTC-3. Obviously I had to come up with a special WTC, its dimensions driven by the available space within the KILO kit. Note that I've already done some preliminary work: substituting my own cast resin control surfaces and horizontal stabilizers for those provided with the kit. A delightful feature of this kit is the fact that the two hull halves split at the design waterline! Neat! This will make the eventual weathering job a relatively easy task -- but that's way, way down the road yet. Note that I've already test fit a section of two-inch o.d. Lexan tube in the lower hull -- this was such a perfect fit that the cylinders outside diameter is a dead ringer for the hulls inside diameter. Sometimes fortune smiles on me!

The cast resin control surfaces were formed in rubber tools which made use of kit parts worked as masters. I could have used the kit parts, but they would have presented a bubble trap problem as they are hollow (each control surface and the horizontal stabilizers are made up of two pieces each, of relatively small wall thickness -- this rendering hollow parts). The operating shafts of each control surface was to be a one-sixteenth-inch diameter length of brass wire, so the masters and tool were so designed to capture the ends of the operating shafts so as to permit inclusion of wire inserts within the tools during the casting operation, yanking the pins out of the cast parts rendered the desired bores to later accept the operating shafts.

And this is where the project is today: an auxiliary ballast tank has been added aft into the lower hull (linked to the main ballast tank at the front of the WTC through an 'equalization tube'), fitting of the cast resin control surfaces and horizontal stabilizers, and development of the specialized WTC-2/KILO. A few of the kit parts still on their respective trees seen at the bottom of the photo. At this point I don't plan on producing a specific propeller for this project; the hope is that the existing kit propeller (two versions provided) will move enough water to get the job done -- we'll see.