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SSBN-629 Boone
I live in the Great White north (aka Rochester New York) where 100” of snow is not abnormal
during the winter, and it can begin as early as September or October. This means I had only
a few weeks to do one more Sub run in my backyard test tank before having to close it for
the long winter.
As this is the year of the pandemic most events were cancelled and the Boone didn’t get into
the water since last February at our last YMCA run. Also our local pond was low and had a
very large weed monster presence so I didn’t run the Boone at the pond runs.
While running the Boone in my test tank, I noticed that the boat would run for a while and
then the motor would stop running for no apparent reason. All other functions still worked.
Nothing seemed to get the motor going again until I would toggle the piston tank on/off.
At first I thought it was a “loss of signal” event which my failsafe is set to blow ballast and
stop the prop. Further research showed that this wasn’t the case as the ballast wasn’t
being activated.
This prompted me to give the boat a good look for broken or bad connections. I did find
that some connections were corroding but not broken yet. But as there were some corroded
connections and the clear hoses were turning brown from running in the ponds, I decided
to pull the tech rack out and do a much needed inspection.
Tech rack disassembly is not hard but it does take a lot of patience and care to ensure
that you don’t break anything and that you remember how everything goes back together.
It is a time consuming task that you don’t want to do any more than is necessary so I took
the opportunity to document the removal procedure for next time, and replaced all clear
hoses so I would not have to do this again for quite some time. I also replaced some
suspect cables and cleaned connections.
After all of this, the problem still remained. We finally found that replacing the receiver
battery pack fixed the problem. (I use a separate Receiver Battery pack for Motor Noise immunity.)
Upon a closer look at the 8 year old receiver battery pack, we found that 2 of the 4 batteries
were badly corroded. I took great care to ensure that the weight of the new RX battery pack
matched that of the original pack so that the trim of the boat would not change. This should save
time and effort when we get the boat in the water again.
This Engel Lafayette boat was purchased in 2004, shortly after I noticed that it had been released.
I finished assembly and launched the boat in June of 2005. This boat has been a great running
sub and is the one I have the most run time on.
I live in the Great White north (aka Rochester New York) where 100” of snow is not abnormal
during the winter, and it can begin as early as September or October. This means I had only
a few weeks to do one more Sub run in my backyard test tank before having to close it for
the long winter.
As this is the year of the pandemic most events were cancelled and the Boone didn’t get into
the water since last February at our last YMCA run. Also our local pond was low and had a
very large weed monster presence so I didn’t run the Boone at the pond runs.
While running the Boone in my test tank, I noticed that the boat would run for a while and
then the motor would stop running for no apparent reason. All other functions still worked.
Nothing seemed to get the motor going again until I would toggle the piston tank on/off.
At first I thought it was a “loss of signal” event which my failsafe is set to blow ballast and
stop the prop. Further research showed that this wasn’t the case as the ballast wasn’t
being activated.
This prompted me to give the boat a good look for broken or bad connections. I did find
that some connections were corroding but not broken yet. But as there were some corroded
connections and the clear hoses were turning brown from running in the ponds, I decided
to pull the tech rack out and do a much needed inspection.
Tech rack disassembly is not hard but it does take a lot of patience and care to ensure
that you don’t break anything and that you remember how everything goes back together.
It is a time consuming task that you don’t want to do any more than is necessary so I took
the opportunity to document the removal procedure for next time, and replaced all clear
hoses so I would not have to do this again for quite some time. I also replaced some
suspect cables and cleaned connections.
After all of this, the problem still remained. We finally found that replacing the receiver
battery pack fixed the problem. (I use a separate Receiver Battery pack for Motor Noise immunity.)
Upon a closer look at the 8 year old receiver battery pack, we found that 2 of the 4 batteries
were badly corroded. I took great care to ensure that the weight of the new RX battery pack
matched that of the original pack so that the trim of the boat would not change. This should save
time and effort when we get the boat in the water again.
This Engel Lafayette boat was purchased in 2004, shortly after I noticed that it had been released.
I finished assembly and launched the boat in June of 2005. This boat has been a great running
sub and is the one I have the most run time on.
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