I look forward to seeing your skills demonstrated in the renovation. It’s truly an impressive war vessel.
😎

Aha! My favorite model boat. The Zobel class "Schnellboots" (upgraded in the 1970's) are the perfect designed water craft. Sleek,fast, and loaded with electronics. Built for nuclear war with wash down systems.

However, Graupner made a number of errors in the details. I made a number of changes to mine including changing the motors and shafts going to four. I did have a lot of information on my website on upgrading this boat to reflect the original, but because of the internet server expense I had to shut it down. Hopefully I will get this up and running soon, as I found a new server service about 1/3 my previous cost.

I actually started to rework my Wiesel when we were hit by a hurricane over a year ago. I am including photos of how it looks today.

Lew

Today, I fulfilled a long held dream - to own a Graupner Wiesel. I remember drooling over the review in (I think) RCM&E about 50 years ago - but it was well above my means.
I have often thought back to that elegant model, and today I collected a completed example of it. It looks well built, but has some slightly unusual features, such as having no rudder, with steering being accomplished by a two stick (both vertical axis only) operating the left and right motors - which themselves are very small mabuchi brushed motors running from a single LiFe cell.
I plan to remove the motors and replace them with something that will improve the realism of the model on the water, and to replace the rudder, as tank steering seems to be fairly useless on a long narrow hull (as I have tried it on my Robbe W3 Police Boat). It works well if the boat is barely moving, but at any sort of speed, the straight-line stability of the hull takes over - the model continues in a straight line but not as fast.
The builder had also decided to add ballast to get the model to sit at the waterline, but used cement, which might make it difficult to remove when I install bigger batteries and motors.
I am confident that I can get it working well, and am very pleased to have been able to add the Wiesel to my collection.