First foray into RC boats: FeiLun FT012

[Coelacanth]

Hi All,

I came across an ad for one of these, followed the info onto a few forums, Amazon reviews, etc. and the consensus seemed to be it was an amazing, fast boat. I'd been hesitant to venture into RC boats due to the cost. When you found something that looked affordable, you needed to add a 3S battery, radio system and sometimes a bunch of upgrades. The sub-$100 items all looked to be slow-speed, barely above toy-grade quality boat packages. I was surprised to find that this FeiLun FT012 package comes complete, it even includes the 3S LiPo...for $108.99 shipped to Canada was the cheapest one I could find on eBay.

The sporadic negative reviews seem to be mostly people who didn't bother to lube the prop shaft properly before driving it. I looked up mods and a few forum posts by boat enthusiasts suggested a brass prop to upgrade from the plastic ones (you get 2 spares in the kit, I believe), and aluminum rudder assembly, a 3mm-to-3mm coupler to replace the little double-joint/dogbone unit, and possibly aluminum stabilizer fin assemblies to upgrade the plastic stock ones. I bought all of the upgrades except the last one for $23 CAD on eBay, shipped.

Here's the review that sold me:

https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?2310142-Fei-Lun-FT012-the-FT009-brushless

Do any of you own this boat? One thing I don't care about is the black color and graphics/stickers. I'm not a fan of any kind of stickers and was hoping I could remove them easily enough with a hair drier. I would like to repaint it with something brighter so you can see it more easily on the water on a dull day. Have any of you repainted a similar boat, or can tell me anything about these FeiLun boat graphics & finishes? Is it just ABS plastic molded in color?

Looking forward to this!

[GoMachV]

wow that thing scoots! Found them as low as $80 shipped on ebay

[Coelacanth]

It seems you can't go wrong for that price...it was just what I was looking for to get into RC boats. Other than the aforementioned upgrades, a higher-capacity battery than then 1800 mAh unit would be a recommended upgrade.

[tamiyadan]

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[Coelacanth]

I received the boat a couple weeks ago, made sure the electronics worked because the box it shipped in was really beat up...I blame it on the shipping, not the seller, though. The stock box was packaged well enough to prevent damage to the contents. I'm never satisfied just running something out-of-the-box, and I didn't like the all-black color with cheesy graphics. I want a boat that's a bit more unique and more visible, too. The boat is only about 15" long, not including the prop & rudder. I got the boat on eBay for only $107 CAD with free shipping. Within days of pulling the trigger, I'd already sourced an upgrade metal prop, aluminum rudder assembly, a set of Atomik Barbwire stainless steel turn fins and some colored hose to go with the paint scheme I have planned. The boat comes with Deans connectors, but I'll replace those with XT-60 connectors for better waterproofing.

Here's the boat, stock:

As mentioned, I'm upgrading the stock clunky plastic turn fins with smaller fins for the Atomik Barbwire boat, a suggestion I got from a guy over at RCGroups.com. Stainless can be polished, so that was the first thing I did, before stripping down the boat for painting.

[Coelacanth]

Apparently, these boats originally came with an ESC that was prone to burning out, but the manufacturer impressed people (for a made-in-China company) by rectifying that...the newer stock should come with a blue shrink-wrapped ESC instead of black, so if you buy one, make sure you insist on getting one with the blue ESC. Mine fortunately came with that one.

I was disappointed to see the graphics on the boat weren't stickers, which would've been easily removed, but actually stencil-painted on before clear-coating the top, and the ones on the bottom silver hull wet-sanded out very easily. At any rate, I wet-sanded the areas I planned to paint to a uniform hazy texture to prep the surface.

I applied a few coats of FasKrome, to back the green and blue pearls I'll be using.

The green for the hull is a custom mix of lime pearl and some drops of emerald green pearl to make it a bit darker. I then did some fades, a technique that I suck at, but it ended up turning out pretty good. I used the emerald green to fade the lime green into the silver stripes, to make the green and blue stand apart more...and decided to fade the front of the boat too, I was feeling more confident by then.

[Coelacanth]

I then applied blue pearl to the top cover and side graphics...turned out really nice, but I have to re-spray the cover. I noticed a big stringy piece of lint stuck in there; need to let it cure before I wet-sand and repaint. It's looking WAY better than the original black. I can't wait to see this when it's clear-coated and buffed out.

[Lowgear]

Wow, that's coming out really nice! Sometimes I wish I had the talent to paint something more than one or two colors.

The only advice I can give is to make sure the prop is balanced. Brass props need to be balanced as far as I'm aware. The only props that don't need to be (besides plastic) are the fancy CNC machined props they have these days.

[Coelacanth]

Thanks Lowgear, you're right...I bought a prop balancer last week. I was told the aluminum props wouldn't need balancing, but those are $20 and up, just for a tiny little 32mm prop.

[Lowgear]

I've only owned one boat before that required a brass prop which is how I knew they needed balancing. Luckily I found the one I needed already balanced at the time. It will be interesting to see how your experience with doing it yourself is.

I was just looking at the raw props price compared to the CNC ones over at Offshoreelectrics and they're not all that far off from each other. That surprised me as I figured the ones you have to do yourself would be a lot cheaper.

[Coelacanth]

Here is the finished paint scheme, before clearcoating.

[XLR8]

The paint job is stunning! Nice work.

[Coelacanth]

After way too many weeks than I expected, I finally finished the custom paint-job and clearcoat of my FT012. I discovered after buying a decent HVLP spray gun that the learning curve to spraying on 2-stage clearcoat was a lot more than expected...it's a whole different technique than simply spraying paint--something I was getting pretty good at! I researched a ton of websites/online tutorials and YouTube vids, but no amount of reading/watching seemed to be enough. I had to learn exactly how MY particular spray gun worked, and that took trial and error--on a sweet paint job I was so afraid to screw up. And, I didn't just want to pay someone to do it, because you learn nothing from that.

So after going through pretty much every issue clear-coating you could imagine--dry spraying (not enough clear), fish-eyes (unexpected contamination of the clear resulting in spots), a few minor dust nibs (those were pretty easy, just wet-sand them out) and a few runs (clear went down too wet), I think I experienced and learned from every mistake you could make. Fortunately most of the mistakes eventually were mostly fixable with a lot of elbow-grease and wet-sanding, followed by polishing.

After clear-coating the top of the hull (the part that I painted), it was bothering me that the Chinese company had these raised logos molded into the plastic on the bottom of the hull. I know it probably wouldn't affect hydrodynamics TOO much, but it still bothered me...so I sanded off the logos until the hull was smooth, but had to sand down a tad too much, removing the silver paint to expose the white ABS plastic...so I decided to mask and spray the bottom part of the hull Krylon Fusion for Plastic in a metallic grey. Then, I clear-coated the whole hull. When I unmasked some of the previously-painted areas I masked off, it pulled off some of the clear...so I had to re-clear one side of the hull. Grrr....

After the final clear-coating was done, and an hour and a half of careful wet-sanding, I finally finished the hull paint job, and I can get on with the reassembly.

It's a lot of hours of work to put into a $108 CAD boat, but...I guess it's the hobbyist in us all that isn't satisfied with simply unboxing something and driving it in "RTR" state...most of us take things to the next level, or three.

Hull before:

Hull after:

Finished painting, clear-coating and buffing/polishing:

[sbednara]

looks great! when you hitting the water?

[Coelacanth]

Hopefully in a few weeks! I have some more mods and reassembly to do...waterproofing the top and bottom hull seams on the inside is important, as leaking there is one of the downsides of the FT012. It's also good to shim up the motor end of the prop shaft a bit so the U-joint lines up better with the motor shaft. I'm replacing the thick, clunky plastic rudder with a generic aluminum unit, and the 30mm plastic prop is being upgraded to a 32mm aluminum prop for an Atomik Barbwire 2. I just finished epoxying on a little plastic brace on the inside of the stern to more securely mount the aluminum rudder assembly, which requires 2 new holes to be drilled.