Experience Actual observation of or practical acquaintance with facts or events; knowledge or skill resulting from this.

I'm no stranger to r/c'ing GATO/BALAO/TENCH class submarine models. I got Steve Vick's little SSY 1/96 TRUTTA working with an early version of my WTC-2.5. And

above you see the SSY 1/76 boat I got working for a client, here being trimmed out in my 'test tank' (the kiddi-pool used by Granddaughter Rose). It was the occasion of getting this boat to run effectively that I abandoned the WTC-3 mod 2 in this application and switched to the smaller cylinder, WTC-2.5/GATO.

My familiarity with the drive train and arrangement of control surfaces (the fact that I Qualified aboard A TENCH class boat serves me here) of these very tightly packaged submarines, with they're very high length to beam ratio, served me well as I designed the WTC's for models depicting the prototypes. A coat hanger and a flashlight, that's the way to learn about submarines, boy's and girl's. Practical experience is the best teacher.

Here, on the overhead mill, I'm using the rotary table to rotate a motor bulkhead casting over the bed as I us an end-mill bit to cut in the o-ring groove.

Talent A special aptitude or faculty; high mental ability

I'm talented. I've always been interested in the craft of model building and have worked my entire adult life to learn and sharpen my abilities. This activity, coupled with a better than average IQ, has permitted me to accomplish a great deal and to also contribute to the general knowledge base. My talent is, in large part, a consequence of the many things I've learned from those who came before me who had the talent to share and the desire to teach. And I've learned, and continue to learn from many of my contemporaries.

I've served at the feet of my betters. I took their instruction, learned to apply the lessons, improved where I could on those lessons, and pass on that knowledge. And so should you ... there are no secrets!

Nearly twenty years of WTC production ... and things have changed little from 1988, the year I came up with the removable Lexan cylinder ideal. Nearly two decades ago I began producing this product for commercial sale. Countless boring hours in the shop doing 'production work' has been my reward ... heaven knows, it ain't the money! Those many hours given up. Time I could have spent innovating, inventing, advancing the state-of-the-art. No innovation, no useful thinking, and no fun. But, that production work helped pay the bills. And I've introduced this activity to a great many people who by themselves would never have been able to participate in the hobby of r/c submarining.

Hope you ingrate's appreciate what I've done for the hobby!

Ha! ... who am I kidding!? The only thanks I get from some of you characters is the occasional, "How come your products cost so much?" or the always appreciated, "I'll just have some Mexican copy your work for half the price."

Thank you, sir! Can I have another ...

Design Preliminary plan or a sketch for the making of ... ; plan, scheme or concept

Over the years I've developed a feel for what materials are best suited for specific tasks, and how to arrange things to perform exacting mechanical functions. Case in point is the design work that went into development of the WTC-2.5/GATO motor-bulkhead -- the after most bulkhead that mounts the two geared Graupner 400 motors, four 1/8" pushrod watertight seals, antenna, and two 3/16" shafts. A bit of a challenge to get all that stuff packaged onto a bulkhead possessing a face diameter of only 2 3/8"

Your looking at the two-piece Renshape 40 ( http://www.freemansupply.com/ RenShape450MediumD.htm ) two-motor motor bulkhead master mounted atop my Taig lathe faceplate attachment. I did a similar job some ten years ago (the WTC-3

mod 2), I examined the resin pieces of that larger of diameter, two-motor bulkhead to help me design an equivalent bulkhead for the WTC-2.5/GATO. Note that my working drawing was done in pencil (I'm not perfect ... yet) on 1/4" graph paper.

From initial concept in your brain, you do a few simple sketches to get the general layout of components straight, then you render the design as two or three orthographic projections (front and side, in this case) to catch dimensional paradoxes, component interference, waste of available space, or other design shortcomings that would degrade item function or utility. You finalize the drawing and from that you lay out the dimensions to the medium(s) you will create the prototype/ master from.

Innovation Bring in new methods, ideas, etc.; make changes

Manufacture of the 3/16" shaft and 1/8" pushrod water tight seal bodies had always been an expensive (read: time consuming) aspect of WTC production. However, three years ago I had a brainstorm (mini-stroke?) and thought: "Why not encapsulate a simple rubber round or quad-seal sectioned o-ring within a cast resin body"? And you see the result above, to the left. Today I've refined the tooling and casting processes to produce, in mass, encapsulated 1/8" pushrod o-ring seals within polyurethane bodies. You see a traditional Oilite and brass body in cutaway to the left.

Subtle design changes to specific WTC components over the years (vent valve, ballast blow/vent linkage, equipment rails, resin brand changes, watertight seal body, etc.) has both streamlined production and provided the customer a more reliable, better working product. But, other than that, it remains hard work to gets these WTC's out the door and into the hands of r/c submarine enthusiasts.

Note that this cutaway unit shows a standard flanged Oilite bearing fit within a machined brass body, the rubber cup-seal is sandwiched between brass body and Oilite bearing. The Oilite bearing is made fast within the body by three punch-dimples. However, I cannot claim originality here. This is a method of production I copied from the Godfather or American r/c submarining, Skip Asay. Skip's the guy who invented and made commercially available cup-seal type units for the trade so many years ago -- just one of his many groundbreaking innovations; inventions and specialized devices that have done so much to open up the sport to the rest of us.

Prototype An original thing of which copies are made

As I typically use the word, prototype describes the subject from which I formulate the look of a model display -- typically that display to some fractional size of the prototype. For example, my buildup of the Wallace 1/16 kit of the Japanese midget submarine, KAIRYU (Sea Dragon), is grounded on the shape and colors of the actual vehicles built by the Japanese in the late 40's, i.e., my model CAIRO is based on an actual prototype. Scale models typically are a physical representation of some prototype.

In model building circles, that initial item, from which copies are based, is described as a 'master,' a 'pattern,' or an 'original.' The WTC-2.5 motor bulkhead is original art and be described here as the prototype/mockup/master: And I build it as a practical machine and if it works as planned, that the unit is found to integrate well with the rest of the WTC system, it is then employed as a master from which intermediate or production tools are produced, and from those tools are manufactured the cast resin parts.

An important consideration: As the prototype/master has to be built with dimensional allowances for eventual tool and part shrinkage. If the eventual production parts are to be correctly sized then the critical dimensions of the master (bulkhead flange diameter, spacing between pinion and spur gear centerlines) must be oversized. How much over-sizing? Hell ... I don't know. The amount varies with the magnitude of the dimension -- more allowance (tolerance) for the big distances, less allowance for the shorter distances. The product information specifications supplied by the distributor of the rubber and resin list the linear shrinkage rate of the products in question, you can take it from there as to how much you oversize the master.

But, only sissies read the instructions. Decades of experience has taught me how much to oversize a master to achieve a production parts of correct size. I'm usually pretty damn close to tolerance on the finished pieces.

Production The process of being manufactured.

As much as I like 'making things', most of my time in the shop is doing the above ... production! Grunt work. Stupid, non-skilled, repetitious, mind-numbing production work. Here I'm de-molding yet another WTC-3 motor bulkhead ... since 1988 I've gone through this specific operation nearly four-hundred times! You can see just a few of the many pressure-pots I use to pressure-cast the resin parts needed to build up WTC-3's and other products we produce for the market. Each WTC-3 requires four different types of bulkheads, and about five other specific resin cast items to be produced. WTC making is labor intensive, don't ever think otherwise!

By the way: I'm the guy who popularized the WTC concept over here in the United States; I was the first to make them commercially available in any meaningful amount. And I've been doing this for nearly twenty years now. So ... all you other WTC part and system manufacturers out there: a 'thank-you' every now and then would be appropriate.

Or, to be less subtle about my stature in this area of product development and production ...

... WHO'S YA DADDY?!

Years ago I produced and marketed the WTC-3 mod 2 for the Dan Kachur 1/48 Type7 U-boat kit. That cylinder features two independent motors in a three-inch diameter Lexan cylinder, with a gas type ballast tank large enough to produce the reserve buoyancy needed to lift Dan's kits superstructure and sail into the air high enough to achieve the models designed waterline. The cylinder worked fine in that application, and I've used it aboard the SSY 1/72 GRP GATO too. But, in the GATO, the three-inch diameter cylinder is such a tight fit that there's little annular space for the required ballast weight and buoyant foam needed to give the boat an adequate metacentric height -- as a result, 1/72 GATO models using the WTC-3 mod 2 tend to suffer poor roll stability.

Here you see the substitution of the smaller WTC-2.5/GATO within the SSY 1/72 GATO. The smaller diameter cylinder features a longer ballast tank to provide the same floodable volume as the WTC-3 mod 2. The WTC-2.5/GATO provides an increased annular space between cylinder and hull which permits more lead and foam to achieve a taller metacentric height (distance between vertical c.g. and vertical c.b.) and a dedicated dry space forward of the ballast tank for the propulsion/control battery, depth controller, speed controller, additional servos and other devices -- a space not available with the WTC-3 mod 2.

You're looking at the initial version of the WTC-2.5/GATO cylinder, this one featuring a single Graupner 400 motor, geared 3:1 in a motor bulkhead internal gear train. The

single output shaft from the motor bulkhead inputs to an external (in the water) 'gear splitter' (three spur gears and one pinion). The gear splitter outputs to two counterrotationg shaft couplers ... and for you QUABECK/FOXTROT Driver's, this gear splitter has an (as of yet, unused) output for a central, third shaft!

Sheet metal work is but one of the many skills I've become proficient at. You're looking at some of the equipment rail units installed within our WTC-3. Lightweight, strong, easy to work, and taking up little internal volume, aluminum sheet was the material of choice for this application.

Knowing what materials to use for specific situations and how to manipulate that material is the essence of model building -- the wider the range of materials you understand and know how to work, the more varied and complex of form and function the projects you can tackle with success.

More production work: soldering up the on board bottle pressure vessels, an important element in the gas type ballast systems I build into my line of WTC's. The on board copper bottle contains the liquefied Butane/Methane gas used to expel water out during the 'blow' cycle. Soldering is just one more fabrication technique to learn and master.

Attendant to any specific skill-set are the subsets of related activities needing to be understood and practiced to achieve any useful product. Soldering describes the general technique. But there are many operations, each having to be correctly executed, before the actual soldering operation can be done. To prepare the onboard bottles the copper end-caps and lengths of tube have to be cleaned through abrasion and chemical washes; the tubes and mounting studs have to be measured from stock and cut to length using bandsaw and cutoff wheel; standard rubber clad tire-valves have to be turned on the lathe to remove all but the business-end of the valve housing and the all important Schrader core, the valve itself; the assembled tube and end capes have to be coated with an aggressive flux/rosin to clean away oxides that would inhibit solder contact and to also reduce the effects of surface tension of the molten solder in order to get good contact and even flow; The work is heated and solder applied, in this case a high temperature Tin/Antemoney alloy to stick the caps to the tube; a marking fixture is used to guide a punch as I identify where to drill holes in the tube for mounting studs, discharge tube, and tire-valve stem; holes drilled; then the studs, tire-valve and discharge tube soldered in place with a lower temperature Lead/Tin solder (its working temperature lower than that of the solder used to attach the tube and end-caps); each onboard bottle assembly then cleaned and tested for correct operation. All this done in mass to achieve as high an efficiency-in-numbers operation as is possible with my limited shop space and resources.

Production work!