The ideas behind this project date from looooooong ago: when I was a kid, I was playing with Playmobils, high quality plastic action figures made in Germany. I had cowboys, construction workers, cops, you name it. But there also was a terrific pirate 2 masts ship which was kicking my saliva glands into overdrive. It was fully crewed, equipped with 4 cannons firing plastic balls, a crane, a working anchor, and a lot of small pieces like cutlasses, pikes, knives, pistols, muskets, gold pieces, lanterns,... It was equipped with wheels to play on flat surfaces but most of all it was able to sail on calm waters. It was way too expensive for my parents but fortunately my neighbour kid had it and he, my brother and I spent some long afternoons sailing across the seven carpets, looking for glory and fortune... Haaarrrrrrr!
In Europe, Playmobil is a lego-like success story. 30 years later, they are making the same products, as sturdy as before but better looking. Guess what, my kids love them.
(You can check their products
here. As you can see, the pirate ship is still produced with some minor improvements. It is priced around 100-120 €.)
2 years ago, they made a special edition pirate sloop (1 mast) priced around 50 €... At the time, my kids were already playing with modern playmobils and also with my old ones (well, the ones who survived firecrackers and BB rifle assaults), but they weren't really into the pirate serie. I wanted to buy the sloop for them but I wasn't sure that they would appreciate it much... until I saw it one day priced at less than 30 €! I couldn't resist anymore and bought it as a complement to their Saint Nicholas (in Belgium, we give toys to our children the 6th of December instead of Christmas. Don't ask me why). I spent a whole evening assembling it and rigging the sails. The playmobil kits are always very well done and fitting perfectly, but this one was much more complex than the average.
Anyway, the kids were happy but they never played with it as much as with the rest. So 2 weeks ago, I picked it from their toys and decided to try to fit a RC unit that I had bought at least 9 years ago....and never used.
First, I was suprised to see that the 2 servos were working perfectly. Kudos to Graupner for the reliability...
Then I decided to avoid drilling and cutting in the frame. I wanted to be able to give the ship back to the kids as it was, and I only used double side and heavy duty tape to mount the servos and a functional rudder.
Here is the result:
Here is a 4 MB movie of the servos actuating the rudder and the mizzen.
About the sails, the fore staysail is fixed while the square mainsail can pan a bit left and right to catch the wind. I tried to control the mizzen with the second servo but it proved to be mostly useless: the amount of travel is too short to have full control while the hinges supporting the mizzen booms were to stiff to allow the sail to fly freely. It turned out that the amount of wind needed to make the hinges move was nearly enough to make the sloop capsize!
The state-of-the-art rudder
(wood piece and adhesive tape) did a so-so job. The ship was turning correctly to the right but poorly to the left due to some flexing, and I wasn't able to set it up so that the sloop could run straight!
