4 Attachment(s)
TFL 34" carbon fiber Cheetah Twin
Attachment 167867
This boat was originally built and raced by Darin Jordan back in 2014. You can see that build thread here. It has now found it's way into my fleet after at least one other owner. Darin orignially built it to race on 4S and I'll likely leave it setup that way. I've been working on it over the past few weekends to make a few of my own tweaks and I'm just about done.
I pulled the rudder and re-centered it on the transom to get a better steering geometry setup. I filled in the old holes with epoxy and drilled and tapped new holes in the aluminum transom reinforcement plate. I believe the original rudder was a shorter setback design and had different mounting holes. That rudder was quickly replaced in favor of this longer version to improve turning at speed. I also drilled out the pivot bushings and replaced them with a brass sleeve that had a much tighter tolerance.
I think the rudder change is why the linkage was not as optimal as it could be. To fix that, I moved the servo to the bottom side of the electronics tray to eliminate interference with the canopy lip and shimmed the servo horn to get the linkage in the right location. I used a 3mm threaded stainless rod with ball joints at both ends to eliminate any slop in the steering response. The TFL rudder attachment arm was too far behind the pivot point for the orientation of the steering servo to maintain proper alignment. To fix this I made a small adapter from 2mm carbon plate and moved the pivot point forwards which fixed my geometry problem. Darin likes to hide the steering bellow inside the hull and I'm pretty sure his build are where I picked up that trick. I decided to trim out the small section of brass tube sticking out the rear of the hull with a short piece of carbon tube. Cleaned things up visually.
Attachment 167868 Attachment 167869 Attachment 167870
