Failed Attempts
I've had a number of attempts in my bait boat quest and the number of hours I've put in has been way too many. I hate to think how much I would have spent if I'd paid myself minimum wage but I've had alot of fun, learnt so much and it's my time so I can do what I want with it. General view of two failures below.
My 1st
This was my first attempt at building from scratch.
It was made of wood (thin ply), took ages to make (my woodworking skills not being great) and to be honest looked terrible also. It was also quite heavy. Heaviness is really bad as you'll need more power to push the boat through the water. The more power you need, the bigger batteries you'll need assuming you can't re-charge at the bankside. This innevitably adds even more weight and so it goes on. It's no wonder that many commercial bait boats weigh 5kg or more!
It was a single hull design and it used two motors and had no rudder. The motors were used for steering and propulsion. Of course I had to solve the Transmitter Control Issue but I found that the boat was pretty uncontrollable whichever method I used. This was most certainly due to my build quality rather than anything else. I found that the motors ran at different speeds (despite being identical) and this made things even worse.
The single hull design was also a big mistake as I found it easily leaned to one side...again not ideal.
Am not sure if you can see the bait dropping system I used from the picture above but basically is was a plastic tray which pivoted and I used a fairly beefy servo to control it. Again I wasn't happy with the results and eventually put it in the darkest depths of my shed.
I never used this boat in a fishing situation. The open water test was enough to convince me that I needed to re-visit the project and start again.
My 2nd
This was my second attempt but not exactly built from scratch
I was, at the time, pretty fed up with my wooden attempt and started to realise how much time went into building the hull. I was interested to see if I could do this quicker....or perhaps buy a hull that would be suitable. After much head scratching and ebay hunting I found a cheap (under £30) twin hull rc speedboat on ebay that I thought would fit the bill nicely. It had two motors so didn't need a rudder so it seemed like a great deal. The other benefit I thought of was weight. If I could get a lightweight plastic hull then this woud save power.
I remember when the parcel arrived at the door and I opened it up. It was pretty disapointing to be honest. The plastic was very thin (like a 2litre bottle of coke) and it was completely sealed so I couldn't get to the electronics very easily.
All that said, I continued with the project. I cut out the top of the hull, left the motors and props in place but replaced the rest of the electronics with the stuff I had from my first attempt. I then put a plastic box on the top and hinged this to the back of the boat. Using a servo I rigged up a system so that the servo would lift up the front of the box so the bait (and rig) would fall out of the back.
I did use this for a weekend fishing and I have to say that it did work. It lacked a bit of bouyancy (wasn't really big enough) but worked all day on a single charge with two of us using it. The weekend was extremely wet and I did have issues with water getting inside the boat...mostly from the top! Water and electronics do not mix well. I had steering problems again although not as bad but the boat was somewhat tricky to control.
By this time I felt that I had learned what I needed to learn and though about a 3rd Time Lucky project.....this is now my bait boat!