[110919]

Well, there’s a painting in the works (third one this year, and it’s almost done, actually), but J doesn’t look like he’s going to update anytime soon, so next update, and thus, said painting, may not go up for a while. This week, it’s Titanic redux.

We last left Titanic about a month ago after it lost its propeller thanks to my craptastic piloting. I didn’t intend to get it back out on the water again this season, but obviously, fate intervened. Through some sequence of events, I made a trip out to “local” J&M Hobby with some siblings and family friends, and I asked them if they had any propellers for model boats and the like.

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[110820]

It’s “Boats 2011 Part3″ this time because on Saturday the 13th, I drove Titanic off of a wall and into a debris field, losing my only propeller in the process.

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[110807]

Officially, I want to name it “Ita-Titanic” or something along those lines. This is obviously a play off of “itasha“, and the reasoning will become clear in a bit. Also considering the coincidentally appropriate “Itanic”. As of the last update, there was still a bit of work to be done, but at this point I think it’s more or less complete (for now).

I say “for now” because this is as much an art project for me as it is a hardware project… or at least that’s how it’s turned out. When J and I first considered doing boats round 2, I had really just wanted to bring Titanic up to par mechanically (fix the leaks, streamlined circuitry, real ESC, etc), but as I mentioned in the last update, once the mechanical business was sorted out, I got caught up in cosmetic improvements. Even then, I’d originally only wanted to make the single cutout as shown last time, but things just kept going.

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[110804]

Well, it’s been a while since the last update. Admittedly I haven’t really done any drawing since then, which is why this is a non-drawing update. Instead, J and I are doing RC boats again. A few years ago, we basically took scratch-built RC boats and sputtered around a pond(?) near J’s house for loads of shits and giggles. Hopefully there will be more giggles and less shits this time around. I think the tag is “hardware project” or something to that extent.

This is the Titanic. I call it the Titanic because the hull is actually from an approximately 1:350 scale model of said ship. When I was very young, I bought the kit at my (now long defunct) local hobby shop and putting it together at that age was obviously disastrous. Over the years, the rest of the ship has gradually been torn up and discarded, but just getting the hull has probably been well worth the $60 I paid for the entire kit.

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[110628]

I’m looking out the window of my work place and seeing rain. In June. Not even like the beginning of June, but June 28th. This is actually pretty ridiculous. I wonder abut my commute later today.

Anyway, I was sure that J was going to use this as his update before today, but since he hasn’t and I’m working on a painting now, I will.

This monstrosity, made even more monstrous by my modification of the frame, is basically a rubber band Gatling gun built from KNEX. Each unit on the carousel is a modified, compacted version of this, which can hold eight “rounds”. With eight units, the gun has a capacity of 64 rounds, which it can discharge in… well TBD.

More pictures to come later, especially if we fix it up this weekend.