The Jackal Submarine: Touching Up

The last week has been pretty productive. I've spent it finishing off a lot of little things I started but then found something more interesting to do. The first thing I did was put all the rest of the bolts in the base of the sub and start cleaning the steel around the water inlets / outlets and seal them up with Sikaflex-291 (the marine grade stuff).

The sealing begins. I mainly wanted the Sikaflex around the welds where the metal joined the hull of the sub because they were big welds that had a little bit of rust around them, which caused small areas to be a little dodgy in their sealing capabilities. I cleaned it as best I could, but this was one of the things that I had started then left whilst I did other things. I've since made a rule - if I can't finish it, don't start it. We'll see how long that last though...

27/01/2015

Here I'm starting to get the rest of the bolts in, these three didn't go in as accurate as I would have liked, but they'll still do their job just fine. They ever so slightly tilt towards the left of the sub (when it's upright, right now it's tilting away from the camera).

27/01/2015

After about 48 hours the Sikaflex had hardened enough to put some undercoat on it.

28/01/2015

Seeing as the first few bolts weren't lining up the way I liked, I borrowed a piece of 10 mm thick angle bar from Dad to run the length of the sub between the first and last bolts so that everything else would line up perfectly. There is still a slight tilt to the subs left, but that can't be changed now.

28/01/2015

I moved the angle bar up so I could properly weld around the base of each bolt.

28/01/2015

Here I rolled the sub around with the angle bar still attached (it was hard by the way, with that bar attached the sub was extremely heavy) so that I could weld the heads of the bolts inside with out letting the welds twist the bolts in any way. The end result was pretty good.

28/01/2015

And here is the base for the ballast release system made from an old blade from a mill. It's about 16 mm thick and made from high tensile steel. After drawing the rough outline and drilling a hole in its center, I cut it out with the angle grinder and ground it to a basic circle ready to turn up in the lathe.