RC Tugboat

When I worked at Novell in about 1992,  I was on a business trip in Seattle and found myself sitting on Pier 59 looking out over the Puget Sound. I was feeling pretty stressed over whatever was going on at work when I noticed a tug boat chugging across the bay. The sky was blue, the water was calm, and the tug looked so peaceful. I told myself that in my next life, I wanted to be a tug boat pilot. 

I went home and bought an RC tug boat kit from Dumas Products. It's a replica of the Shelley Foss, a small tug owned by Foss Maritime in Seattle*. I built the boat to the point that it was sea worthy, but I didn't ever finish the details. 

In 1994, I called the Foss company one Friday morning to see if I could visit and take pictures of the boat to get details for my detail work. The Foss guy said that would be fine, but the tug was not very available. It would be in the tug boat races that weekend and then heading to Alaska. Tug boat races? Yes, as part of Seattle MayFest. 

I called Randy and told him we were leaving immediately to drive to Seattle. We drove straight through, sleeping only for about 30 minutes near Baker, Oregon. We arrived at the pier in Seattle about noon on Saturday, and walked right onto the Shelley Foss, along with family and friends of the crew. When the boat was readying to leave the pier for the races, we proceeded to deboard. The first mate stopped us and asked if we weren't going to participate in the races. We said that we weren't invited. He said that he wasn't telling anyone. So we stayed on the boat as it line up and raced among several other boats in its class. 

*The Shelley Foss was built in 1970 by Albina Machine and Engine Works of Portland, Oregon. It was painted Kelly Green and white. In 2010 Manson Construction Company of Seattle, Washington, bought the Shelley Foss and renamed it the Nancy M and painted it red and white. Manson added bow push knees to move barges and derricks. In 2020, The Island Tug and Barge Company of Seattle bought the tug, renamed it Island Breeze and painted it dark green, teal and white. An upper wheelhouse was added for pushing gravel barges. It's powered by two twelve-cylinder Caterpillar D399TA diesel engines, which produce 2,250 horsepower. 

I got my pictures of the real boat, but the RC model sat on a shelf in our storage room until a few weeks ago, when I pulled it down and decided to finish building it. Here are a few pictures from the project. 

This is the condition the boat was in when I started working on it a few weeks ago. The original kit had a flat bow, but the boat we rode in 1994 had a pointed bow. So, I recut the nose and made it pointed.

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I made the railings from a couple sizes of heavy aluminum wire. I tried welding them, but they melted at about the same temperature as the welding rod, so I ended up epoxying them. 

This is a fire nozzle that I built. It will be run by a car windshield wiper pump with a hose running through the hull. None of the items I'm building was part of the original kit, so I'm inventing this stuff as I go. Several things failed several times before I found a solution that worked. 

This is the combination flag and antenna pole. I am not sure yet whether the antenna part works. The brass tube might shield the antenna and make it useless. I will test this later. If pushing the antenna through the tube doesn't work, I'll attach it to the outside of the flag pole. 

My office is my workshop, and because I've been drilling and sanding a lot with a drill and Dremel took, everything ended up covered in dust: Desks, cabinets, computers, printers, cameras, everything. 

Another view of the boat in progress. 

This is the seaworthiness test. The pink nylon bags hold lead shotgun pellets. I have to weight the boat down to sit at the correct depth in the water. The boat failed this test, by the way. Water leaked in through a hole that had been drilled, possibly for the fire nozzle hose, and patched in the hull. I repatched the hole with a piece of aluminum and epoxy, which worked just fine. However, water then leaked in through one of the drive shafts, one of which had broken from its brace on the outside of the hull and cracked the drive-shaft housing inside. I epoxied that, and I disassemble, cleaned and polished the kort nozzles so they would turn smoothly. They had been clogged with paint. Everything is now working fine. 

I built a barge so I can drag my GoPro camera behind the tug. I started with a 2x6 board. I filled a 2" black steel pipe nipple with lead shot and put a torch to it. The lead melted just fine, until it ran out the bottom of the nipple onto the aluminum plate I was using as a form. So I put a cap on the pipe and redid the process. I removed the cap and drilled a 3/8" hole through the cooled lead. I then put a 3/8" x 6" bolt through the barge and the lead pipe, with washers to seal it. This weight sticks down from the middle of the barge and stabilizes the barge to keep it upright when the camera is on top. I was concerned that even with the weight, the barge wouldn't be stable with the camera on top, so I added 2" ABS plastic pipes on either side as buoyancy tubes. They are sealed with end caps and attach to the barge with snap-in brackets cut from 3" ABS pipe. The top of the barge has five eye screws, three to hold the tripod and two to attach ropes to the tug. The tug also has matching hooks on the stern. The bottom of the barge has a GoPro mount attached with double-sided tape and a screw.  

I decided that I wanted smoke coming from the smoke stack, so I got an aluminum gadget box, a small glass jar, and a small RC car cooling fan from Amazon; a small oil lamp porcelain top and wick from Hobby Lobby; and diesel fuel from the gas station. I built a diesel lamp below the roof of the cabin. I used a section I cut from the handle of an aluminum window washing pole to make the smokestack. I cut a bend in the pole and epoxied it. Then I added Bondo to elongate the body of the smokestack. This was about my third attempt at a smokestack. The smokestack you see in the picture further up in this post (with blue tape on it) was a failure. I cut that smokestack from wood and ran a 1/4" copper pipe through it. I attached a small cooling fan to a section I cut from a steel kitchen funnel and directed that into the 1/4" pipe. I first tried a tall glass bottle for the diesel lamp. I also attached an aluminum plate to the bottom of the fan as a baffle to protect it from the flame. The diesel lamp burned fine, but when I placed the smokestack on the cabin, the baffle was too close to the lamp, and it snuffed out the flame. So I went to a smaller bottle and moved it further down into the aluminum cabin box, which required grinding away the epoxy and re-epoxying the shorter bottle into the aluminum housing. This one burned okay and didn't snuff out, but no smoke came out. Thus I tossed that whole thing and started over with the bigger aluminum pipe and a bit larger fan as described above. 

Here's a picture of the smokestack actually working with fan churning away. But this is the only time it will work this way. I worried that the flame would be too hot for the plastic blades in the cooling fan, and the fan might stop working. Then I decided that maybe I didn't need the fan, so I pulled the fan with its sculpted stainless steel funnel and aluminum baffle contraption out. And guess what. The smoke pores out just fine. That was one idea that I way over-engineered. 

Here's the almost-finished boat. That wire rope is a piece of 1-1/2" cable that is what the Shelley Foss uses on its rear winch to tow ships. 

I'll add a video to this post when I get a chance to take it onto some water somewhere. Everything around here is pretty much frozen right now.