The Good Ship Easystar and other adventures

Been a while since a post so there's a bit of ground to cover.

On the rotary front I have now had two successful nose in hovers with the TREX - the altitude was pretty higher (5 metres or so) so I was giving myself some margin for error, but I've done it, and the second time was easier than the first, and hopefully it will keep on getting easier.

In other news I now have a Minium Cessna. These cute little 16g RC planes are amazing. Having done a bit of indoor flying now I would have thought getting a scale model that looks this good, and fly this well would be impossible. Bit pricey but it does include everything.

On the topic of indoor flying, it was almost the end of the Cessna. I took her down to nitrodude's indoor night last Saturday having purpose bought her that afternoon. Having had a go on Ground Dancer's I was happy I could handle her, and taxied out. She completed a half circuit before finding the one environment which the superlight plane doesn't automatically survive without problem - the spinning blades of a rotary aircraft. She was brought down with some massive gashes in her wings, busted prop and for a few moments I though she was busted for good. But with a bit of tape, and a prop from another model (thanks Jan) was able to have a number of good circuits indoors with her.

I've also been able to fly her in the street outside which is kind of mad. I just step outside and launch her. If she gets into trouble I just cut the power. She landed on top of one of the bushes out the front the other night.

Have a number of new RC projects on the way. Have grabbed some stuff from Richard Woods at Aussieflight including a Cow warbird (Corsair) which I'm looking forward to seeing. I've also got an Easybox coming from Paul Daniels at NQRC. I'm planning to set that up for indoor flight - hopefully I can build it light enough to make that practical. Finally I've also grabbed a new flycameone 2 from The Mongrel. However, here's the thing - all of these purchases failed to arrive by the end of the week. What happened next was not my fault - you know what they say - the Devil makes work for idle hands...

Here's a hint:

Yes - for some time I have been thinking about how to set the easystar up for amphibious operations. The big long smooth bottom fuselage seems perfect to float in the water (notwithstanding the holes I drilled in the fuse for cooling).

So - I used some duct tape to seal the bottom of the fuselage, and built some really dodgy floats to hold the wing tips out of the water. I wasn't really interested in a particulalry challenging engineering operation, and just wanted to quickly trial the ideal, and decided to velcro the supports to the wing.

So after flying down at Kambah this morning the crew that were about went down to Lake Tuggeranong to try out the amphibious easy star.

Looked good from the start - she floated at almost eactly the height I had planned for and the floats were beautifully holding the wing tips level above the water. The Mongrel (who was flying with me today) was shaking his head about the float supports (they were certainly dodgy but I thought they would make it for a trial.

Here's the youtube of the mornings flying - the Amphibious Easystar is at the end.



So after the flooding you see at the end of the vid there was some speculation that the ESC or RX was fried, but it seemed to get better once it dried off - I haven't retested, but I think they are okay. I'm glad I have the video of the failed take off. Hopefully it will help me figure out what went wrong.

Here's another vid with some flying buddies including ground dancer with his Minimum Cessna (he's the one that convinced me to buy one).



Okay - gotta go.

I've got Friday on my mind...

Pretty busy with work (yuck) ATM, so don't have long to post. But I though I would quickly share these videos that the Mongrel shot of our flying over the weekend.

The Mongrel had a new Eflite P47 Thunderbolt model to maiden. I gave him a push in this direction, but he did plenty of independent research too and the P47, or "Jug" came up trumps according to all accounts. He had a very successful maiden, and the plane just slows down beautifully to land.





The zero had a bit more footage shot of her..., this is nice to have of course. With so many flights under her belt you figure her time has to be close to up. BTW I switched from an APC style 8x6 to GWS Hyper Drive 8x6 prop, and man - what a difference.




The Mongrel also strapped his FlyCamOne2 to the top of his Ultrafly ViVi for a bit of a pilots eye view of a flight.



Finally, we also tried to capture our warbirds in flight (from the air using the easystar as the camera platform) with Nathan as the pilot in the first instance, and then tried to catch Nathan's Cessna in flight with myself as the pilot - it's harder than you might think - here's what 15 minutes footage yielded:



Not great perhaps, but we had fun.

The Mongrel is selling those Flycamone2. His blog is linked on the left, although I'm not sure the shop part of it is open yet. For mine I would say the flycam's are impressive little units. Light, very high resolution capture (as always youtube mangles it). As for the Easystar - a good camera platform for the most part, although lacking the rudder authority to maneuver at low speeds. Must get round to doing that rudder mod. Okay - I have to do some work - Ciao.

The Weekend

Well, a bit more flying this weekend - heh - what else would I be doing.

I also finally got a successful flight and landing with the Mustang yesterday. I've also found out why I've been having a great deal of trouble flying her. Made to spec she has a wingloading of 18.14 oz/sq ft, or 48g/sq dm - that is massive. To give you some comparisons - the Zero has a wing loading of around 11 oz/sq ft, and the Parkzone Mustang has a w/l of around 14.5 oz/sq ft.

Anyway, after the failed landing attempt with her on Saturday (yes there's a youtube vid of it at the end of this post) she went on a diet on Saturday night. After the landing on "Saturday" the flap servo had broken - so, ditched that plus linkages, and taped up the flaps - including using tape to make close the gaps between the flaps and the wing (so hopefully extracting every bit of lift from that wing) That saved about 12 grams (almost half an ounce). Then I flew her on a 3s 1500mAh rather than a 2200mAh which saved another 46g. The 3s1500 isn't the best battery in the world. It's already done 100+ cycles, so its voltage tends to be a bit average under load, but I just wanted to test what a difference being ligher made.

So, having saved 58g (about 2 oz) I flew her on Sunday. I wouldn't say she was a different aircraft by any means - still pretty portly, but at least she didn't just stall when the power came off, and the difference on landing was noticeable.

Anyway, with a slight breeze on Sunday the first successful landing of the P51 on retracts was pulled off - yeah.

Flew with a big mixture of people on the weekend. The Saturday flying (including the stang er..., landing) is on this vid - check it out.

See yas.

Cheers,
Oz.