Tinkering and tying up loose ends

I have a lot of loose ends around the shop. Two are new submarines I built a while ago but never had the time to tweak and go over them. I’ve spent the last couple of days making sure their systems are working well and most importantly, I have no leaks.

The Nautilus has never even got wet or has it been balanced. Yesterday I did that. Got the lights working, modified the pitching prop shaft. Tested. Tested again and got everything running smoothly.

The worst problem is using old FM radio. Since 2.4 doesn’t work under water we have no choice but to use frequency modulation. Whenever I ran the motor the entire system would glitch. It took 2 hours to isolate the cause. It was hair pulling out time but I found that the two cables coming from the servos nearest the motor and it’s capacitors were too close. Just that little bit of field coming from the two servo leads combined with the noise from the motor was too much for the old receiver. So I stretched them back away from the motor and it all stopped. The glitching was gone. Moral to the story? Never give up!
Then I brought the sub home and put it in the hot tub to ballast the boat. That took some doing too but I did it.Now the Nautilus is ready to run!

I also did a bunch more work on the dirt track. I love this little track, what a childhood joy!
So much more to do. Finish the Saturn 1B. Finish Laser Blast. Build a new Estes rocket(have had for a while design by Harry G. Stein). Test the formula one cars and get racing again. Oh and finish the dirt car. It needs an interior, driver and other small bits!