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[SimonCornes]

This is a difficult one. I have just acquired a 1/24 scale Fairmile D MTB with 4 motors. Sadly the builder has passed away so I can't ask him what follows but he's made a lovely job of the boat, which is a Kingston Mouldings hull with the superstructure scratch built and weapons acquired from the aftermarket - I can't think of the name but years ago a company was making detailed weapons for coastal forces vessels and I think thats what I've got. This is not the Deans kit as far as I can tell.


The chap who built it was an electrician by trade and he knew what he was doing but I am fine with one rudder servo and an ESC, preferably Maplins, Electronize or Action and that dates me! This one has a right rats nest of wiring so I'll tell you've what I have seen and that I want to connect this lot to a Radiolink transmitter and 9 channel receiver.


1. There is a Battery eliminator module - a King Max UBEC so that sorts out the RX power supply
2. There is no propulsion battery so I don't know if it was Ni-Cd, Lead acid or Li-Po but the battery mounting area is about 6" by 4" with a couple of strips of velcro so maybe it was lead acid? But then maybe not from a performance point of view??
3. 4 '540' sized motors.
4. Motors connected to ESC's via a little module with a thick clear sleeve. Two red wires to motor terminals and one green wire bolted to mount. The wires to the motors are quite thin - not your thickly insulated multi strand powerboat type wires.
5. The left hand pair of motors are connected to a pair of Fusion Aquapower 1836T 5-10 128A FNR (P-FS-AQP128) ESC but the leads to the receiver are siamesed into a single receiver plug but the red wires are disconnected.
6. The right hand pair of motors are connected to a single Marine ECO M-tronic 3i ESC and the lead for this also has the centre (red) wire disconnected
7. None of the ESCs have water cooling fitted.
8. The plug for the main battery is a blue plastic 'EC3' plug.
9. There is a large 8 ohm 6-10W speaker connected to a sound unit of some sort which has an M119 integrated circuit.


This is all way beyond my experience. There is no mixer included. I guess I could connect the ESC's to the left throttle stick and have the right stick as a throttle to? Of course there's a rudder servo but I can understand that!


Not sure what I do with the 'sound' module. The plug has a brown/red/orange wire - same as the M-Tronic ESC - but Im not sure where I plug it or how it works???


I would be very grateful if someone could have a read through this and point me in the right direction please. I am hoping that this boat will perform well but Im concerned that a 12V lead acid would prevent that, maybe it would be better with 11v Li-Po's ? I have a pair of those that came from the same seller but they have the usual 'T' blade arrangement plug, not the equivalent of the blue EC3 plug. I haven't charged the Li-Po cells although I have a charger - this is my first experience of these things so Im a bit wary of them!!


Many thanks


Simon


 

[SteamboatPhil]

Could we have a picture please (not for me steam is my thing ) but there are many on here who know all 

[DocMartin]

SimonCornes:
Photos of the "rats nest" will be of great assistance here.

What are the basic dimensions of the hull?  Length, width, weight??  I ask because large hulls will require a fair amount of ballast to get the hull to sit properly in the water.  More ballast might suggest that large 12V SLA (sealed lead acid) batteries were used.  The battery mounting area suggests the same. 

The disconnected red wires suggest your ESCs have their own BEC circuitry.  Given that you mention a separate BEC module, the disconnected red wires would disable the redundant BEC power sources.  Just a guess.  It also sounds as if you have an Msonik-3 Marine Eco ESC.

Again, pictures would be very helpful to solving your issues.

DM

[Klunk]

If your from stoke, there's the potteries club that could help

[SimonCornes]

Thanks for the replies guys and Klunk, yes I have been a member of Potteries Model Boat Club since the mid 80's but this is a 5 foot long boat so not the sort of thing you trot down to the lake with for everyone to inspect, hence I thought I'd describe what I have to see what the combined experience of MBM could come up with! Given its an MTB capable of 30 knots and powered by 4 x 500 sized motors driving scale 3 blade brass props - that look like Prop Shop ones -  then Id expect that it would need to be as light as possible but I do have a pair of 3 cell 5000 Li-Po batteries so I probably have the voltage I need? This morning I found a wiring diagram that Action suggested for the Dean Marine Fairmile D and that is powered by 4 500 motors. I have now identified the 4 fuse units in my boat as Action P95 but Action then use a P94 dual ESC mixer and a P92 power distribution board. Now I don't have either of those but I could plug the speed controller wiring into the two fore and aft moving Transmitter sticks and operate the throttles independently - I do that with an Imara tug and it steers much better on motors alone! No problem with plugging in the rudder servo so that just leaves the sound module. What do you do with that? I'm assuming it makes a noise like a 'marine Lancaster bomber' with its 4 Packard Merlins but for all I know it's just a foghorn! I know nothing about sound effects modules! As for photos. I use an iPhone and stopped using photo hosting services like Photobucket years ago!