Now there's a title you haven't seen here for a while.
One of the longtime members here, and a good friend offered me a 26" catamaran hull the other day. Now, there's a lot of work necessary to get this hull usable and I hit upon an ideal of how to power it. Somewhere, in some box, I have a Lehner Basic 5300 mounted on a Hughey geardrive and some old Fullers Cat hardware. I used this drive system in a Graupner Key West using a setup similar to one that Jay Turner (a.k.a. Fluid) wrote about in an RCBM article maybe 25 years ago. I built this Key West maybe 15 years ago.
So I'm digging through boxes and what do I find? That old Key West in remarkably good condition. I live on the coast, so it never really gets dry here and the hull hasn't seen sunlight since I put it away all those years ago. The plastic has not dried out or become brittle (well, at least, not much) and the boat is completely salvageable. Other than the rubber boots on the rudder linkage, it's all good. It has an old Schulze Future 88Wo ESC that should still work, I just need to solder new connectors on it. I originally ran it on 6 NiCds, so it will get a 2S2P setup.
Rather than tear the power system out of this and scrap a perfectly good hull, I think I can get it back on the water as something fun to run.
Here are some of the old build photos. After I clean it up a bit, I'll post new ones.
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