Aeronutz News letter No 6 Jan 2003
You are invited to the next Aeronutz Fun Fly on Saturday 25th Jan 2003. 5pm until 11pm. Parklands Centre, Wigston Rd. Oadby. £8 per flier, Bring a warm jumper as the heating will be off, tables and chairs are provided. All fliers with models over 10g must be insured. Remote control machines must have semi scale appearance - on sticky looking things please! If your are unsure please check before travelling. Max. Weight for any model will be 80g. This would have been lower but we are pleased to see the super scale Falcon kit's balsa machines from Chris at RCS Technik.Latest News ........
Peter Smart's 8" span Pitts Special relaxing with some CD's.
Experimental - how true, as it is being converted to fly with a geared 4mm pager and 5 Farad super capacitor, free flight (Gulp!)A-plane-a-day-Ray has a new ducted fan plane, Z Tron infra red controlled foamie - a 14" span D.H. Vampire. He says it is already off the ground and flying so it will be nice to see it on Saturday. It uses one of his own design one inch diameter ducted fans and polymer cells. He also has some new 0.6" Dia. ducted fans! These use a pager motor and one of Graham Stabler's voltage boosters. The mini whizzers use just 170mA and produce a fair amount of breeze - maybe good for a mini flying wing with proportional Z Tron infra red control and memory metal pop-up wing tip dragalons?
Jeff was delighted with his first micro R/C model last month - a simple wall foam cabin design with coil actuator and Z Tron control system (see pictures below).
Now he has progressed onto a 16" Tiger Moth with floats and a 12" Tiger Moth with wheels. Both will be Z Tron/coil actuators, probably direct drive so they are silent fliers - should be quiet something to see (and not hear).
Mark has optimized the Didel 4mm pager motor for use with a 40mA hr polymer cell. This set up should be ideal for a 50 percent power to weight ratio wall foam plane. At 3.77v battery voltage it produces 4.5 grams of thrust = 9g flying weight aeroplane. This might sound super light but the combined weight of the motor, gears and prop is just 3g. Add another 2g for the cell, 1g for the Z Tron Rx /Esc, 0.2g for the two memory metal actuators and you have a weight of 2.8g for a wall foam plane - easy peasy if its a 10" span 2mm wall foam mono plane. The power plant draws 120mA at 3.77v which is very important because the 40mA cell should not be loaded up with more than 200mA, preferably 150mA.
New! Mark has joined the newly formed Leicester's Air and Space Agency (L.A.S.A).
He has been working on a new design of memory metal actuator for our micro planes. The new design is easier to make and allows the actuator to be built directly into the rudder/tail which reduces the weigh by not having a "chassis" for the actuator. This new design required high technology materials to very strict quality tolerances. Mark adds "L.A.S.A. researched suppliers and teamed us up with Buttons Boutique haberdashery. The new actuator is now working very well on the bench - should be able to do some flight trials at Parklands on Saturday "
The new actuators use about 45mA at full throw when the battery supply is down to 3.7v. At 4.2v it moves really quick so there should be no reason to use full deflection, which is way too much current for the actuator.
So eh, 45mA + 120mA = 165mA, which would equate to several minutes of flight from a 40mA hr poly. cell with an efficient 9g aeroplane? Time will tell.
The next development is to make a smaller diameter prop. for the 4mm pager so we can use it on multi engine planes. Mark and Gordon are both working on a prop. with a diameter of about 80mm dia.Nice to see the American's are now starting up some new indoor fun fly venues.
Matt and the Black Sheep Squadron where at the recent AMA conference flying thier micro planes.Janne's Junglet He has made a Jigglet IR controlled using a geared KP00 and 145mA poly. cell
Peter Frostick has been busy with his caps and gliders .... " 1940s style power duration 14", model with 5 Farad 'Super cap.' and 5.8 Ohm MV2 motor driving U80 prop, reduced to 2.5" dia. and thinned ---- result, over a minute duration at 12 grams model weight!! Entire building of model took one day!: a day well spent me thinks!!!! The cap. was charged at 3.5v and limited to 500ma current --- these caps seem very greedy on unregulated power supplies, and without some sort of regulator it could be BIG BANG TIME!!!!
The wing of my 'Bill style' rubber, F/F, 10" span, glider was inadvertantly trampled by Ambrose, our friendly moggy, so now sports a 10 thou steel guitar string under-surface spar --- tiny weight gain, and no loss of performance!!! it still bends realistically too. Ambrose is now' designated 'official airframe tester'!!!!
Graham Stabler has a new micro milling machine - so he can build a one inch gas turbine, about time someone did too!
New throttle for Co2 by Matt uses a coil/magnet actuator. The throttle valve is a prototype by Gasparin and Matt says it is really easy to adjust. It uses the Bob Selman standard actuator As you increase the throttle stick, the power to the actuator is reduced, and the spring opens the throttle proportionally. Reduce the throttle stick, power to actuator is increased.The throttle requires highest torque to close the throttle, a spring opens the throttle. At completely off throttle, the actuator is 100% on - so in flight the actuator is not drawing much current. Matt says "The most difficult part was to achieve good proportional operation near half throttle. To achieve this, I added a small, secondary, magnet on the outside of the actuator which tends to pull the actuator to the middle position, which also gives very good, smooth, proportional throttle from 25% to 75%. Without the secondary magnet, the throttle tends to snap from fully open to fully closed. Photos show test set up. 3.50 V and 150mA max. current so you could use a 2g 40mA poly cell. Better just check to see of the Co2 lasts longer than the cell!
Matt has an article in RCMicroflight about coil/magnet actuators.
While Graham Stabler has an article in Ezone about coil/magnet actuators.
Bernard has drawn up the patterns for his Bernelli like lifting fuselage model
Bernard's free flight Depron Bernelli like model was flying very well. This is not really a Bernelli 'cos they had two motors - but he is a pensioner you know, KPOO's don't grow on trees (Birds grow on trees Ed)
Made from 2mm Depron (the plane not the plans)Bernard has made a new capacitor powered Depron F/F model. It weighs 15g and uses M2V 5.8 Ohms motor with 5 Farad super cap. It is a cabin sports model with cut down prop. Nothing amazing here, but after 15 years of nagging he has managed to spread a thin layer of yellow acrylic paint over its entire surface ! Yes - its not white
New Rx from Jean Louis in France. www.microplanesolution.com. Check GB icon and select receivers. it is FM. 72 Mhz. (41 on test) Rx: 5 channels 1g with crystal & antenna 150-300m range Work with all the commercial Tx (PPM signal) It is a special for coil/magnet actuators.
Matt has made a Muscle Wire actuator for a simple rubber power stick plane. He has spot welded the MW to nickel tabs and used a simple stick of wood as the chassis. It weighs 0.05g! THAT'S NOT A LOT! In fact you could use the rear of the stick fuselage and not bother with an actuator chassis at all. Picture below shows the MW actuator. The terminals are on the right and the output arm is on the left. Its about one inch long.
Into the future .......
If Mark's new Muscle Wire actuators work Ok we can use several channels without adding lots of weight. So we will have to have a new control system which uses eight channels. Not all need to be proportional of course, some up/down and maybe a couple of simple on/off's would be fine.
Mark, Jeff and Ray all successfully stiffened up 2mm wall foam with various types of carbon fibre, so we can use that for building 10 to 15g micro planes - much easier.
We have a good selection of motors and gears now.
There are lots more venues to fly in these days.
ASDA are selling all butter cookies for 39p
Seems like we are going to have lots more fun in the next 12 months.There's a thought - Small park flier - free flight, we could use a strip of Muscle Wire to pull the rudder over to keep the plane flying into wind, as the capacitor runs down so the MW stops pulling the rudder and it starts gently turning and drifting back down wind? . This could be very simple - just direct wire the MW to the cap. The MW only pulls one way against a spring. so it is really easy to do.
Stirling park flier. Peter Smart showed us his whooping carved foam Stirling free flight bomber, its about 30" span. We think maybe four "B2" N2 size motors with direct drive U80 props should power the beast in silence from one large poly cell. As it is to be a park flier Peter will no doubt use his on board timer to throttle back - otherwise he better take his passport when he goes to retrieve it!.
Recent History .......
Our last fun fly was great despite the icy weather.
Lots of folks came along with a huge range of toys - just what we wanner see.
Hope everyone got home OK as it was very very cold outside, Barry's car door lock was frozen up.
Hello to the new folks who came to our last fun fly. One of Bernard's mates had a nicely made Jigglett. Melton John and Wigston John where helping get it flying, didn't see the results although I assume it flew as they always do. If you can make and fly a Jigglett you can make a 10g R/C micro plane!
Nice range of planes on the end of
Peter Smart's tablePeter Smart's Lanc. was brought down by Carol's mum. Well it was going to land on his table full of planes anyway so maybe not a bad thing - although catching it would have been a better idea.
Three wise men from the east ..... It was good for the new fliers to see the expert indoor fliers models. See what I mean about the art being more difficult than the science?!
Peter Smart had a little motor glider like machine powered by one of those super small Gasparin Co2 motors, the prop. was about one inch diameter!
Anyone have any experience of DIY gold plating? In particular mini staples and heads of needles !
Nice to see Chris from RCS Technik. He flew his own desing/Falcon kits (see photo below). The yellow TM did very nice power glides in almost silence. RCS Technik have some new stick and tissue outdoor planes and revised thier web site.
Bernard's Cap plane flew OK, it was not too obvious which plane it was AS THEY ALL LOOK EXACTLY THE SAME, well apart from the Bernelli and sea planes.
Good to see a FLYING Auto gyro from one from the new guys. It was rubber powered and looked great. So eh? Was Graham Stabler just making it look difficult then!
Dr Chris flew is Lancaster powered by four pagers. This was the first time Peter had seen it - he seemed suitably impressed.
Carbon fibre props. Gordon had a new prop. which we hope will be suitable for our 10g micro planes using 4mm geared pagers and 40mA poly. cells. The massive gearing required to reduce the load of the cell results in a slow revving prop. So a bigger diameter is required but not that would be limited to the size of the plane! Maybe wide blades and and lots of em? !
Ray had some nice flights from his Z Tron IR controlled Swordfish bipe, This model started out as a two cell NiCd plane but now has polymer power and a geared pager with a three blade "wind mill" prop. made from yought pot plastic. Looked really nice in the air, slow and quiet.
Mark's planes where hopeless. The 9.5" Albatross bipe was only just finished and the CG was out, resulting in a stall/roll which tested the combined U/C, former, cabane strut ideal - the rear cabane struts ripped of the foam on one side of the fuselage and the cells and motor came loose so it was put to one side. The carbon stiffeners seemed good though. Mark's 8g Zero with IR control was not much better, nose heavy and broke it's prop shaft retaining collar??? Strange thing to break.
Mark's floundering about did not detract from the evening as we had a huge amount of other interesting stuff aboutInventors take note - it's the things that don't work that give you clues to what will work!
Peter Smart brought his olde Hampden twin motor foamie. He is looking in to adding electric motors. He got advice from 486 people so he is no doubt completely confused! The best bet would seem to be two 5.8 Ohm direct drive motors, U80 props, one 140mA cell and fly at 32g total with 16g of thrust. Twin steering will be marginal but he should be able to miss the walls if it is trimmed as a F/F plane.
Peter Frostick has been experimenting with cut down props for use with 5.8 Ohm motors and Super Caps. He says he is getting good results by having a curved TE and leaving the LE standard. Thin blade yoghurt pot props could be a winner too.
Peters Smarts Super cap power Spitfire looked better than it flew. The plane was a little too big so he is fitting another capacitor in series - no doubt be too powerful now! Peter also had a DIY electric ducted fan unit. He showed it to Mr ducted fan (Ray) and it got the thumbs up. Peter was testing it will a pack of four Ni Cd 120mA hr cell, Mark suggested using a 140 or 220mA polymer cell, saving a bucket load of weight. Also saves space as a D/F plane needs a big central duct - eh? Where do the batteries go? Might be a good idea to have a carbon fibre fuselage former with wing spars built in?
Graham brought his DC3 Dakota and sure enough is flew as well as he said it did. The occasional aerobatics where a result of radio control glitches. Uses two of Gordon's carbon fibre props and servos, servos? He had his IR controlled delta flying really well on one flight - over charged it maybe? It still uses olde fashioned 50mA NiCd cell so it should go very well with the new poly cells as they will reduce the weight and increase the power.
John's free flight tricycle double flapper. It looked very impressive but was serenely damaged before I got a picture of it. The two flapping wings where side-by-side driven from a central common rubber motor. It had "tail feathers" and the structural parts seemed to be carbon rods. It did not get airborne but was seem scuttling about the floor looking menacing - wheels are a pain for F/F models as you cant stop the thing!
David Deadman had his usual fleet of super scale, blue foam, WW2 planes. Rubber power free flight.
He also had a couple of olde balsa super scale machines that where left to him.
Thanks to Mike for pointing out that Mark's camera had run out of film!
Andy's yellow and red Tiger Moth was flying very well. All foam construction with his own modified Potensky R/C Rx driving coil actuators. Note the nice spongy foam wheels from FliteHook (thou shalt not covert another man's foam wheels ,.... Ed)
"Everything went dark, I looked up and saw a free flight toilet seat cruise by"
Barry's toilet seats flew well, rubber powered Depron, he had two this on is red and white very red and white, He also has a Storch with slats and flaps. He said it flies at a funny angle of attack so they must be doing something! Rubber power, Depron and his usual 20" or so span size, free flight - interesting
Below - another nice Barry plane, cant remember which one this was based upon.
Graham Stabler is hosting a column at the Ezone, first up is a nice article about coil actuators.
He is looking for contributors if you are interested.Nice to see a profile stick and tissue plane with artwork printed on to the tissue using a computer ink jet printer, looked good. Maybe put tissue on the other side of the fuselage too? Just mirror image the design on the computer ?
Graham Stabler nearly had both of his remote controlled Depron Spitfires flying, one with a 145mA and the other with 40mA poly cell. Seemed to need a bit of trimming somewhere but looked like they are not far off flying.
Small field: small plane. Mark's 5 Farad super capacitor powered free flight mini park flier. It flew well indoors at our last fun fly, hit a roof beam once, but just skimmed them on several other flights. Climb was not as strong as we thought it would be and the decent was slow as a result. Should be nice as a little summer evening park flier. It is all 2mm Depron, 10" span, high wing vintage pylon sort-of-a-design. Mark is drawing it out to make it into a plan.
Big Up Yourself.
I think our first meeting of 2003 was a fine example of what we have been trying to achieve since we started our Fun Flying last meetings several years ago. We had a wide range of models, easy going fun fliers, super scale expert models, high tech. Micro R/C. Lots of model talk as new ideas where chewed over. People where very free and easy with their ideas and developments. The olde hands helped the new guys get their planes flying. Ray flew a new micro ducted fan electric IR controlled plane, one of the new guys brought along a nicely made jigglet, Chris from RCS Technik flew is super slow DH60 and Tiger Moths now fitted with lightweight lithium poly. Cells. John was trying to get his new tricycle parallel double flapper going, Peter Smart flew the Lanc. and Constellation, Bernard and Mark had successful flights from their Super Capacitor powered sports planes. Chris trimmed out his flying green house, David Deadman flew is squadron of WW2 super scale F/F fighters, Barry had some new 12" Depron toilet seats flying very well F/F.
Planes where made of stick and tissue, Blue foam, wall foam, Depron, Mylar and carbon fibre. Rubber power, Co2, electric direct drive and geared. Wooden props, plastic props, carbon props.. Whatever it takes to make a plane fly nice. Flitehook sold lots of small plane stuff and even gave away some free plans.
Biplanes, tripelanes, mono planes, experimental planes, vintage planes, deltas, twins and fours.
We only rescued three planes with the pole and two of those where in the basket ball nets. Six hours seemed like five minutes.It was cold in the hall, we had the heating off for about one hour and then put it back on. The heating uses gas powered radiant heaters so the ventilation fans and louvers must be open to vent any carbon monoxide. Also the heaters don't heat the air they heat people, and we are round the side of the hall and not really under them to keep warm. So if it is not too cold we are better off without the heating on. If it is way below freezing like on Saturday we should keep the doors to the leisure centre open to draw in warm air from there and avoid sitting under the wall ventilation louvers. Always bring a warm coat either way!
Mark has started writing data sheets on memory metal actuators and uses of carbon fibre in semi scale micro planes.- and optimizing the 4mm pager motor doe 40mA cells ........
Bernard brought his latest steam plant to show Carol's mum.
Mark has lots of photos for the next news letter but here are a few if you are bored
Nice box of "Barry planes" >>>>>>
Melton John's wall foam Migs - thanks for the lift home!
He is not coming on Saturday as he has a date with his girlfriend, the red head one, not the blond this time
One end of Chris Strachan's tables full of planes - yeah, they all flew as good as they look here!
Chris's Facetmobile, micro lite machine, we will have to find out what it is called.
Flew very well when trimmed out, not easy to trim a plane with no wingsMicro stick and tissue either flies or does not - nothing in between, but it flew very well when I saw it
Dave Ridgway's flew his old R/C Vimy
Peter Smart left Mark his most excellent black and yellow Pitts Special. The plan is for Mark to convert the 8" rubber powered foamie to electric flight, probably using a super cap and geared pager. Early test show the rubber power supplied was surprisingly powerful producing something like 7g of thrust at 1000 turns. In its original F/F rubber form the Pitts has a flying weight of 9g. If we can get the super cap to replace some of the nose weight its should be about 10g as a F/F electric plane. The pager will be a bit low on power - but that might be just as well if it is free flight as the motor run could be over thirty seconds and the hall gets pretty small after thirty secondsPeter's Spit was a little too big for the Super Cap so he will try using two in series!
John Hinckley had a really nice back mono plane racer - name? Flew well, skimming the roof steels.
Mark hand launched Ray's super D/F, Z Tron IR, jet and it flew Ok
Seemed very stable. Hopefully he will get it charged up and hand launch it from now on
in stead of ROG.Peter Smart, Chris Strachan and David Deadman came to our first Fun Fly of the new year on Saturday 4th. If you have not seen thier planes before you will understand why I say the Aeronutz planes are just toys! There are more photos of Peter's planes on last month news letter here. These photos do not do justice the superb art work and craftsmanship of these models - and they fly to the highest standard in the world. Maybe even more amazing is these these guys are perfect gentlemen who are happy to risk damaging their machines and chat of humble mortals like us! Can you imagine walking into the pits at a F1 race and asking the top drivers how its done?
Good to see Graham's first home design indoor flier - looks a beauty too 27" span DC3.
"The Dak can ROG from grass (providing it's very short / mossy) and it cable of a steep climb on full power. (No idea how long the KP00’s will last! Radio range poor so far - needs to be re-tested with suppression cap now fitted to motors. Flew great, LOADS of power on two lithium 140mAhr cells and 2xKP00 at 60g. Also flew outside today at the Long Mynd, as the wind dropped right down on our monthly slope outing. Flies OK, but need huge rudder throws to make it turn sometimes. No prop. wash over the rudder? (multis are very stable Ed) Flies on about 1/3 throttle, fairly slow. Too slow and it drops a wing. If it is still working in January, you can see it flying at Parklands. The wing tips have lots of wash out - pointy tips are big trouble! It is made from Depron and 2mm wall foam, mainly Depron"Important Notice!
R/C fliers with planes that weigh over 25g must sit over where Dave Ridgway is. This is due to a couple incidence of stick and tissue R/C planes crashing onto peoples tables and smashing up F/F models - what's the point in the R/C system? These days this sort of thing is totally unacceptable.
The IFO is back on sale in the UK. If you have one of these please check to see if your local indoor venue will allow you to fly it as most do not.Our next fun fly events are on 22nd Feb., 22nd March.
Get well to Andrew H's son Angus who has Scarlet Fever.
Retracts progress.
(no progress)
Infra Red Developments
If you have a Mk3 Z Tron transmitter and you are not using it let us know as there are folks out there who are interested in buying them, there have been a few changing hands this month which is good to see. No point in just letting them sit in a cupboard unused?
Apart from that not much happened this month!
Met vriendelijke groeten / Mit freunlichen Grüssen / Salutations / Saluti cordiali
