South Leicester AeroNutz News Letter
March 2002.Next Fun Fly is on Saturday 23rd March. 5pm until 11pm, £8 per flier, fliers with models over 10g (weight of a pound coin) must be insured. R/C planes must weigh less than 85g and be of scale appearance. Fishing pole, tables and chairs provided. Free parking, hall heating will be on.
NO INDOOR ELECTRIC CONTROL LINE PLEASE!!!Grand master upstaged by grasshoppers!
Having laboured for 5 days to produce a 20g three-channel sensation, Mark was upstaged by Dr Chris, Ray, Andy and Gordon!
Andy’s magic soldering iron produced a 35 MHz, two cells, 13” Spitfire. Blimey! 2mm Depron wing, two cells, profile fuselage with high tech. Thermal induced self material quad fold back plane lateral stiffening (dent!) in the rear of the Depron profile fuslage to stiffen it up. Used a geared KP00, carbon prop. 35 MHz GWS “front end” feeding a Pic chip programmed by Andy. The Pic chip is on a Combo circuit board with voltage booster and speed controller. He had also done a nice paint job, but fell at the last fence by using a tiny tail plane and rudder! - result poipoised due to small tail and torque rolled due to the small fin/rudder. He says he will convert this one to Z Tron IR control and make a new one at 15” span using the 35 MHz system - with bigger tail feathers.
looking forward to seeing both at our next event on the 23rd March.
Dr Chris had a new SE5, this one was just 8" span and weighed 10g! One cell, Z Tron infra red,
pager motor, carbon prop, huge gearing!
At our fun f ly it had one sensor but now he is using two and a better prop. Not easy to video!
Gordon’s super scale Bristol mono plane flew off the board and looked a terrific. It took off from the ground, steep climb and perfect stability, all this from his first two cells infra red plane! Model has scale rigging and a nice spinner, Grodon’s success with greatly helped along by his DIY carbon fibre prop, driven by a KP00 4.75:1 motor. Z Tron infra red Combo Rx unit and one of Graham’s 200 Ohm coil actuators.. Video This vid is Gordon's and the planes first flight, excellent climb, see if you can tell when he throttles back!
Dr Chris drove through a blizzard up on the Peak District hills to fly his most excellent new 20” four motor Lancaster and 10g one cell SE5. The Lancaster uses four pager motors, lots of gearing and super fine DIY carbon props. It is entirely made from hot wire cut packing foam using a deep wing section. Flow OK at our Fun Fly on three 50mA cells, but has since been retro fitted with four and lightened up so it weighs one gram more at a svelt 41g. Steering is via two 50 Ohm coil actuators on the rudders and hand made proportional, 27Mhz R/C. The whole thing looked great and slow nice and slow! Video Clip!
Andrew H took this Picy of Dr Chris's Lanc. It must have been quiet high as Andrew is 8 feet tall. You can see the tail wheel and if you look really close you can just see the smoke from the AA shells! Ray had a new 18g Lysander. Our first two cells plane to have a 2mm wall foam wing. The wing has a 0.5mm carbon rod recessed into the underside of the foam and scale struts. Flew very gracefully on two 50mA cells using geared KP00 and Z Tron IR control. Uses two 50mA NiCD cells, Z Tron infra red, two channels, Looks nice flies great. VIDEO
Special rates for experts - Mark has rewarded the three super stars by imposing 50 percent genuis tax to their entrance fees, Ha!
Success at Hastings, congratulations to Nick Robus for organising a NEW indoor event on the south coats at Hastings. Seems like a good night was had by all, lots of F/F machines and some micro R/C too. Simon's dad (Mike) went along and flew his Ikara P51d (see picture below) which impressed everyone. Nick has a web site now too, well done to all - keep it up.
Nice to see the F/F Jigglets are still a popular way to start indoor flying. Nice picy here of Jim's one. He is now getting intp micro R/C planes - in fact there are a couple of one cell, Z Tron IR, Jigglets about, see current news letter and Andy's vids page. The free flight plane vid on Andy's site is actually a Jigglet ...
Graham's CAP20 two cells machine - still teaching it to fly.
Mark’s 20g three channel Spit. Project - Uses 2mm Depron wing with very shallow aerodynamic airfoil, two 70mA NiMH cells, orange-geared KP00, Dia 100mm thin airfoil carbon fibre two-blade prop. two 150 Ohm coils, 3 x 2mm Neodium magnet for the rudder and 3 x 3mm one for the elevator. Fuselage is 2mm wall foam, tailplane and rudder made from two pieces of 0.5mm Depron glued together with Mylar hinges in the middle. Rudder and elevator are 0.5mm Depron. Hinges are fixed with double-sided tape. Tail is over scale and the rear of the fuselage has been stretched (a little too much!!) to increase stability. The 70mA cells have been slow charged from new and are now being cycled before being charged at several hundred milli Amps. Hopefully this process will allows us to get 500mA supply. The KP00 bench tested at 450mA with its carbon prop.
FliteHook are coming to our 23rd March Fun Fly. The will have various sizes of the new genuine Depron and their usual wide range of goodies, including some tubs of Bison Clear Adhesive. Simon did some videoing. Nice clips of Mark’s Mig 3 and a super one of Graham’s “long play” SE5 two cell machine. Now we are at the end of the season we hope to be able to put all the clips together on one CD disc along with Andy’s and Matt said he would look into doing some of his machines too. This would be valuable design tool for anyone thinking of starting micro planes and would be nice at trade shows and club nigjhts. The quality of the vids is much better than the clips on the web because they have not been electronically squahsed to make smaller files.
Vulcan man gets up in the roof. A little tweaking here and a little adjustment there has worked wonders for Graham Stanley’s two cells IR Vulcan prototype. Good to hear reports of high altitude flights at a recent fun fly in Coventry.
Our next Fun Fly (23rd March) is the last of the spring season, we will start
again in October.Free Flight
Bernard has made a new two cells plane to test the new, 70mA NiMH cells. They seem OK for 500 mA so in typical Aeronutz style he has made a suitable plane - A Sumner (Bleriot) mono plane of 1912. It has a 2mm Depron wing, balsa “oil rig” fuselage and a very respectable 19 grams flying weight.
Ray had a super glider aero tow using a rubber power tug plane. He got up just under the roof where the micro glider parted company - Simon has videoing the plane next door and just missed it. Hopefully we will get some more clips of our free flight machines at our next Fun Fly.
Barry had a go at aero towing too, using his much larger Ajax half size Depron rubber power machine as tug. The Ajax had a double rubber power - ideal for a little park flier on a warm summer’s day me thinks.
Hello to all the new folks who are flying F/F two cells planes as per Bernard’s data sheets. Bernard is pictured in two magazines. One photo is him with some of his two cells planes and the other shows his simple cells charger.ASDA have some of those nice lemon and sultana tea cakes you grill, oooh eeerr, vital building accessories
Mark’s new Spit featured his new carbon DIY prop (making c/f props data sheet available for £3, profits to Aeronutz) On the first touch down the prop flexed and “pinged” off it’s hub! Mark glued it back on with super glue but (of course) it went up the hole and he could not get it back on the motor shaft, bugger! Mark will do more carbon fibre props and test them through the summer.
Park and Garden fliers! Time to design some little foamies for the approaching long
hot summer …
Tea Break! This newsletter is going on for ages!Model Flyer magazine have a nice article and plan on a lightweight electric ducted fan Venom by Richard Chant
Flying Scale Models magazine have Richard Crossley’s plan and article on a super rocket powered stick and tissue design.
Quiet and Electric Flight Magazine have an article by Stuart Marsden about starting electric flight. Bernard features heavily and they is a design for hot wire cutting blue foam. There are two pics of him wearing Mark's red jumper. Page 62 shows him with that well practised "I am a just little granddad" sweetheart smile he has perfected ! The photo of the planes on the table: the one on the left is a two cells Depron machine that our two cell IR control machines are based on. The shoulder wing one next to it is also Depron and flew with two 70mA cells, both planes use direct drive KP00 and U80 props, about 23g.Mark has built a Tx for the Z Tron IR control system by putting the IR electronics into an old R/C Tx. The new Tx uses the old joysticks but new pots. Other features include a fuse, polarity protection diode, external switched for servo reverse, bang bang to proportional output, vee tail mixing.
Mark's Micro gas turbine is a step closer. The Barden Corp. have a new ceramic bearing that can handle 500,000 rpm. Its has silicon nitride balls and is more often used in dentists drills. Fun!
Kylie Minogue is not coming to our March fun fly as she is in the US for the Oscars- Bernard is the same height at 5' 2" if that's any compensation?
Peter Frostick is experimenting with moulding complex foam fuselages, seems like things are going well, and we look forward to seeing his results.
Matt (AeroVironment) in California has sent us some interesting samples of his developments. Mark will bring them along to our next fun fly. His muscle wire powered Mig 15 undercarriage and CNC cut props are sensational! He has bought several square meters of 2mm Depron, assume this is to be used for moulded parts on their vacuum forming machine.
Parks and Gardens - summer is on the way, maybe time for a 30 to 40g outdoor model? Chuck in California (when the sun always shines) has been flying a simple but small radio frequency plane outdoors is still air conditions. He is using the new DU, 72 MHz, R/C system (similar to the Rick Ruijsink MicroMag system) and two actuator coils. The model is a balsa stick plane with a geared KP00. " I flew again ( DU RFFS100 on 19.6 gram - without batteries--Citabria - all balsa profile built from Peck-Polymers busy people kit plans) this morning typical 4 to 5 min flights on 2 cells and 8 min plus on 3 cells. 2 cell pack peak charged at field while 3 packs were charged the night before flight.Tried to loop and fell out at top or sometimes floped over at top of loop.This was with 3 cells. I also experienced a little wing flutter in one dive as I tried to loop.I will try building a foam wing soon. Having fun - Chuck"
Hello to Uttam and his team in sunny Bangalore India - another fun place to fly outdoors, A couple of his recent emails
"Today morning, dad and me took the push-e (13 gms with a N20 ), powered by a cap to the field behind our house. It's dead still at 6:00AM, I charged the cap for just 10secs using 3 110mAHr Sanyo NiCd's. It climbed like a rocket and very promptly
flew out of the field! A broken pod resulted. It's repaired now, with a new
pod installed. Ready to fly again tomorrow morning, but this time with a
some downthrust.
I love 2 cell models, RC would be a very nice. I'm working on
( Me, a friend and my dad ) a radio that works on the 433mhz range. Range
checks proved great! At 3.6V you get over 600' range. The receiver weighs
only a gram and a half, but the other external components, like the decoder,
and the output transistors, a few resistors and a cap do add some weight.
Rudder actuators are made and setup as suggested at the aeronutz website. I
think bang-bang will be good enough for me, motor on off, and rudder control
to keep my models close to me. Has anyone you know worked on this?
(motor off would stall the plane - Ed)
Today morning, dad and me drove up to the flying field here ( About 18kms
from home ). A group of RC'ers fly regularly up there. At 6:30AM, there was
no breeze and we flew the Push-e. We had some 10 great flights on it today.
A 15 secs charge gets it quite high where it needs very little thrust to
stay aloft. Duration's were around 30-45 secs. When the breeze did pick up,
it started to hover, and sometimes, fly backwards!
We also flew a larger model called the Baby Comet. I think plans for it
appeared in an issue of Aeromodeller sometime back. 26" span, about 90sq in
of wing area, AUW of 45 gms with a firecracker coreless motor on 4 50mAh
NiCd's. Initially it had some trim problems (about 1.5mm extra up
elevator ), but this was cured soon. It handled the light breeze well, but
is faster than most of my other models because of too much thrust!
The last model we flew, was my glider design. There are a few pics of this
on my site. 24" span, 4" constant chord, 31.5gms with a N20 on 3 cells. This
was the first time we flew it no breeze conditions, and it proved
excessively stable!! You must see it fly, I'll try to video it and upload
onto my site. 20 secs charge resulted in flights in the 40 secs range. I was
somewhat scared to give it more charge as it climbed well, and once up,
needed little or no thrust to continue flying.
Thanks,
Uttam- India, Bangalore
The pictures on Uttam's his web site - they are big files as the tiny planes look very small in that big Indian sky - a problem we know too well. This picture shows his two cells foamie flying above an eagle - a feathered one!
Len in Bangor is doing well with his bang bang IR system and has now bought a proportional Combo system. Mark has loaned him a two cells plane to base future designs upon.
Andrew H has a new micro pager motor, which is ridiculously small, like Dia 3mm x 5mm plus the shaft length! It will have to be massively geared to get any power out of it but could be good for retracts or multi engine machines?Mrs Bernard is cellebrating being married to Bernard for 60 years - Quiet and achievement!
New Aeronutz web page .... Muscle Wire actuators for indoor planes.
We are told that remote control planes will not be allowed at the Indoor Scale Nats.
Maplins are having a sale, they are selling their accurate electronic scales for £30, resolution is 0.1g
Product code W52G, they go up to 200g.Brian got in a flap with a nice rubber powered Ornithopter, Matt’s electric R/C one flapped for six minutes! That’s a big flap.
John’s triangular funny plane? Just what was that little rubber powered floater that John had? Little tiny wings and a rectangular shaped fussy, flew very well non-the less.
Co2 disaster, OOOpps! Andrew tried a Co2 motor in Depron plane with remote control but there was lots of vibration and the capatian bailed out. Prop balance seemed to be the propblem.Into the future …. and beyond!
We still have many new ideas to develop this summer. Moulding Depron, making carbon fibre props, 70 mA Nimh cells, Lithium Polymer cells, Muscle Wire actuators, radio frequency control system ….Looking forward to the new season indoor season’s wacky developmnts …..
