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More fiddling and measuring at this stage. The assembly manual drawing is generic with no dimensioning. I suppose because there are such a variety of possible servos that could be used. The kit supplies some small wood screws for mounting the servos and suggests you use the supplied bits of wood to make backing plates. The kit suggests you mount the radio to the hatch cover with a piece of double sticky tape, but I used velcro instead. Here is what the mounted servos look like from the bottom:
The screw eyes sticking up from the bits of wood are to capture rubber bands that hook to other screweyes inside the hull (holds the hatch covers down). The sail servo is on the left and the rudder servo is on the right. The radio is the little red box on the upper right.
A top view of the hatch covers is shown below:
The servos come with a collection of different arms, and I was able to directly use one of the ones that came with the rudder servo. The sail servo however, requires a very long arm. The kit included a piece of plastic and a drawing to make this arm. I opted not to do that because the sail servo has a splined hub for the arm to mount to and I couldn't think of a way to create a matching hole in the piece of plastic supplied. Fortunately, the sail servo was supplied with a largish arm that not only had the required splined hole, but also a nice brass grommet on the end to thread the sheets through. I cut the arm in half and extended its length by scabbing on (with super glue) a piece of the material supplied by Victor for the arm. Ugly, but it preserved the features of the stock arm. See below:
One other little problem cropped up in this installation. The cable that is supplied with the sail servo is not long enough to reach from the port hull over to the starboard hull where the radio is. Victor seems to have overlooked this completely. But it's not a problem. The RC folks have a gadget for every need and they make servo extension cables. Who would have thunk it. A quick trip to my fortunately well stocked local hobby shop ( HobbyTown )and I had a 24 inch extension cable. I had also put some thought into how to physically route the cable across the hull. What I came up with was to buy a short piece of brass u-channel, stick the cable in it, and glue the whole thing to the back side of the central crossbeam. Then I painted the brass to match the crossbeam. Looks nice (by which I mean it's almost invisible) and I can easily unplug both hatch covers from the boat and walk away with them. Look at the back of the crossbeam in the photo below:
