A Duck Punt for the Cordless Canoe Challenge

[Randonneur]

Well done on your win!
Pete in sunny Beale.

[Jeremy]

Thanks Pete.  Nice to see that Alan also won, makes a pretty good record for the UK HBBR!

The challenge next year is to get it on the plane..............

Jeremy

[Dennis A]

Brute force, sound engineering and a £500 limit won the CCC, but I was pleased that 1st and 2nd places were taken by converted pedal boats.
I also liked the other prizes going to Alan for his fresh approach to the subject and Jeremy for his simplicity of design which gave him the most manoeuvrable boat in the race

Well done all the winners

[Alan]

Who was second, was it Dennis?
Both Fast and Quackers are eminently practical boats, and you can both add extra power for next year if you use the same boats. I must have been quite affected by all the excitement because I can't stop thinking about CCC design - makes it very hard to get on with mending the bathroom.
It was great fun to circulate the lake in Four Candles but it's not so practical as the others because of that racket going on behind me; I couldn't hear a thing that other boaters were saying.
Technically, I think Quackers was very close to planing, and Fast was slow off the line because her prop was very well matched for top speed. Velociraptor was fast off the line so may even have been able to use a coarser pitch propeller.

[Joe]

Hello all,

I've just discovered this thread and thought I'd contribute the videos I have which are on youtube now:
The final with me, Dennis and Tobias's boat:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXgnDZwzV48

The semi final with Dennis and Jeremy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb-anAmOcx8

I'm afraid I don't have any other footage featuring Alan or others.

I pledged not to do it again before I went, as it has taken such a chunk out of the last few months, but I had such a good time I think I might have to. Next year, maybe a V6.

Bring your pedal unit next year Dennis and we can have a race!

Best of luck for next year.

Joe

[Alan]

Joe,
well done, I absolutely loved the V4. And Meire wants a pedal boat for our holidays!
Jeremy, I was just thinking about the neatness of your inboard/outboard/hull fairing arrangement and then I discovered the nice pictures, a few posts previous to this.

The competition may have been started, and entered, just for fun, but I think it may actually raise general awareness of electric motive power and push the development of electric boats generally.

[Jeremy]

Yes, well done Joe, and thanks for putting up that video.  I'm still trying to track down any photos of Quackers taken from the side, to see what sort of angle she was running at.  I could hear water slapping the underside of the hull hard, and one spectator commented that the front part of the boat was out of the water a bit, and it would be useful to see by how much.

I have gleaned some info from Makita about their drills and battery packs that was quite useful.  I drained a 54 Wh pack completely in between 3 and 4 minutes of running, which equates to a power drain of something between 800 and 1000 W.  The answer from Makita is that there is no power limiting on any of their cordless drills, and they will draw as much current as they can when heavily loaded!  They have also cautioned that doing this will make the battery hot (something I'd already found out) and shorten its life or even permanently damage it.  The warning sign that this has happened is if the charger shows a solid amber light, as that means it is trying to recover the battery by doing a maintenance charge.

As the drive leg I made worked so well, I've knocked up a brushless motor drive for it, so I can easily convert it to a quiet and practical electric outboard.

[Alan]

That snippet of information from Makita is valuable, I may try gearing my motors to the props as one last experiment. I probably had more than twenty minutes of endurance at full power.
Your outboard looks so elegant. Is that motor fitted with hall sensors, and is the controller for electric bikes? And finally, will it be more powerful than the drill?

[Jeremy]

The motor is rewired from delta to star for better efficiency and a lower Kv (rpm per volt), as it seems the majority of RC model motors are delta wound for speed.  I fitted three Hall sensors to it internally so that I could run it from a modded ebike controller.  I bought a batch of bare-board controllers from a chap in China for $20 each, including shipping, and I then fit decent low Rdson FETs to them and do some other tweaks so they are happy running these outrunner motors.  These controllers are nice for use in a boat, as they have a reverse wire, plus they have good current limiting, useful if the prop hits something as the controller will just shut down to protect things.

It's less powerful than the drill, as it runs from 18.5 V with a 40 A current limit, so around 740 W (more or less 1hp) maximum, but it's probably a fair bit more efficient (the drill seems to have pretty  high losses of over 60 W even when not running anything).  It's not really designed for speed, as I've geared it for economical cruise, and I know that my relatively heavy boat cruises at 4 mph on only around 100 W.  I could fairly easily increase the power, as that little motor is rated at 2,800 W peak (albeit on a model aircraft).  It may well be OK for a kW or so on a boat, though.

[Jeremy]

I've got a few photos that I took of the CCC, some of which are below.  If anyone has any photos of Quackers I'd be grateful for them, particularly if they were taken side-on when under way.  If anyone wants higher res copies of any of these, just ask and I'll email them to you.  I'm afraid I don't seem to have any photos of Four Candles on the water, Alan.