The finished article!

After painting the boat I decided to put the decking planks on. This involved gluing the individual strips of wood between a strand of black rigging cord, this was very time consuming but well worth the effort.

PS. The seagull seams to like it!

The next step in the build was to attach the hull sides and make up the deck.

The boat was then sanded smooth on all the edges and coated with wood sealer in preparation for a coating of fibreglass.The fibreglass was a light glass mating as used on model aircraft, this makes it more durable and waterproof.

When the fibre glassing was complete it was lightly sanded and a coat of plastic primer paint applied.

The build was fairly straight forward with very few problems. One of the problems I did have though was the lack of space in the back for fitting a servo and rudder mechanism.

Initially this problem was overcome by installing a cable operated rudder, this delt with the shortage of space at the stern, however the cable was too slack resulting meaning that the rudders centre position kept varying.

I then purchased a minI servo (pictured here), this fitted into the back compartment well and left plenty of room for the rest of the rudder mechanism to be attached. But once again this idea had it's own problem. The small servo didn't have sufficient torque to pull the rudder back to the centre position accurately enough causing the boat to drift off to the left or right a little once the controller stick returned to the centre.

Eventually I managed to fit in a standard futaba servo, this made all the difference and although it was awkward to fit in, it meant that the rudder responded correctly with the controls.

The next part of the build was to align the prop shaft and motor up. I've heard of lots of different ways this can be done, some more complicated than others, however it's the cotton real method I prefer best.

A cotton real has just the right inner diameter to slip over the brass spline coupling connector and means that the motor can fit in the other side an consequently lines up correctly.

Once all the pieces were dismantled it became apparent that some parts needed replacing, one of which was a bulkhead since the old one was warped beyond redemption.

I then proceeded to assemble the rest of the hull as per the instructions. For some parts of the construction I used water proof PVA but the main bulkheads were glued in with epoxy resin to ensure the structure was solid.

The last thing I did before gluing on the hull sides was to fit a block of polystyrene (shown here) into the front section. its more common to leave this cavity empty, however I thought that I might as well fill it with polystyrene so that if the worst came to the worst and the boat got flooded it stands more chance of remaining buoyant.

This is the sea scout as purchased off eBay in February this year (2007). it came with all the parts, plans and build instructions.

As you see, it had only been partially built, then presumably stored away until now.

I decided to completely dismantle this and start from scratch. I then started assembling the boat as per the instructions apart from the cockpit floor which I decided to make detachable so I could fit the battery in there and also have access to the rudder servo.