5 Sep 2012. I'd been wanting to test the radio control gear for a while and today, having glued a support for the rudder servo in place yesterday, I lashed up the battery, r/c receiver and rudder servo and gave it a whirl. It worked!

This picture shows the arrangements I've adopted. I've run separate rods from the servo to each rudder as I prefer a bit more redundancy, and the servo is mounted so the output is central in the boat. Because I adopted a slightly wider spacing of the rudders than the MS instructions the rudder posts are a bit closer to the deck beams. But you'll also notice that the port beam (lower) is a couple of mm closer still. The starboard is correct but I made two errors with the port - one was not marking the position at the stern correctly (1 mm) and the other was then not gluing it in the marked place either (another 1 mm). It is a show stopper mistake and will be hidden under the decks, so I'm not going to try and correct it.

I'm not happy with the whitemetal tillers that came with the kit and seen here. I knew that the screw and nut fastening would be tricky to work once the deck was in place (remember I'm making the rudders removable) but this test showed it would be nigh on impossible. Also they simply don't clamp well - the MS instructions do say they need to be very tight, but even with what I considered to be a lot of torque on the nut/screw I could easily twist the clamp on the post. So I've ordered a pair of Raboesch jobs that fix with a single grub screw and should make it fairly easy to work with under the deck.