The Weekend

Another weekend gone, and back to work. Not much exciting about that eh?

Managed to get in 5 flights with the Tucano and 5 flights with the TigerMoth over the weekend. Although I am almost cursing myself by putting it in print, but I am starting to get a feel for the Tucano. With the Zero out of action I have been relying on her as my go to speedster, and my new 2100mAh NiMH TX battery pack seems to have taken a lot of the glitchiness away from her flying. And this weekend I also sorted out the throttle to elevator mixing so that she now flys in a nice straight line regardless of power.

In some ways she is quite a bit more fun to fly than the Zero. Although the Zero has a better power to weight ratio and better vertical performance, I think the Tucano is a fraction faster in a straight line. Add to that she has a whopping rudder, unlike the Zero's piddly after thought and she is quite a capable aerobat. The one manuveur I really haven't been able to figure out how to do on her is a knife edge. Rudder deflections with the wings perpendicular to the ground just make her fall over onto her back.

One issue that did come up with the Tucano on the weekend was that once again the engine leads had moved so that the motor was wearing against the insulation. I noticed the decrease in performance on the first flight on Sunday. Left untreated I know that this eventually causes a blown ESC from previous experience. Fortunately the fix was easy, just secure the ESC further back so that the leads are pulled away from the engine.

DJ maidened his brand new Ultimate Biplane on the weekend with, for the most part, good results.

Interesting plane. 25 Amp brushless motor and ESC are included in the package. Motor is a direct drive outrunner spinning a 10x7 prop if memory serves. Fully symmetric wing. Big big control surfaces.

Anyway, good takeoff and away, nice first flight, all things considered looks like a very nice bird. Not sure why, but the motor does introduce a lot of vibration and as a result it makes a surprising amount of noise for an electric with a low kv motor. Quite a cool sound in many respects given how often these things work out to be way to quiet.

On the second flight of Ultimate there was an "incident". A loop that didn't really complete before altitude 0. Fortunately it was 99% complete, and so some bent undercarriage, and broken firewall and a few other loose fittings were the only problems out of what could have been a monster crash.

I probably haven't mentioned on the blog that a mate took me for a ride in a light aircraft over Canberra recently. While we were up there I managed to snap this shot of the our Kambah field from the air.

That big bit of black in the middle of the field is our bitumen area. It looks kind of big from the air doesn't it - seems harder to hit in real life than that.

Tiger Moth had four batteries put through her on the weekend. Considering how bent she is, and the fact that I am constantly having to trim her I continue to enjoy just trying to fly her in the most crazy ways possible. She is so bent I really don't think I can be bothered putting a brushless in her, but by the same token I know it would make her even more interesting. I also on Saturday flew her quite happily in a box bounded by the the bitumen area - she is that slow. The only time I flew outside the box was for approach, and even then it wasn't far away.

Finally to the bit of irritation for the weekend (it wouldn't be model aviation without irritation). I've finished the airframe for my PLD Microseether and was hoping to have her maidened over the weekend. I've had all the necessary avionics weeks in advance, so on Friday night was hoping it would all go together in a couple of hours. But it was not to be.

The microseether is a pusher designed really for one particular motor - the GWS 2205 outrunner. Like many outrunners the 2205 has a reversible prop shaft so you can mount the face as the part that doesn't rotate, or the base as the part that doesn't rotate. My motor was setup the wrong way, and the grub screw so tightly secured that I stripped it when trying to get it undone. Have tried a couple of things across the weekend to get it undone (with thanks to Crawf and Inflex for suggestions) but with no effect. Don't know whether I should just order another motor, or what.

Anyway, as Pete Cundall might say if he were a model aviatior, that's your zoomin lot (and you thought the bad puns were gone forever didn't you?).