AeroNutz Fun Fly dates
Saturday 20th Nov. 1999
Saturday 11th December 1998
Saturday 22nd January 2000
Saturday 26th February 2000
Saturday 25th March 2000
Saturday 15th April. 2000
Saturday 20th May 2000
All from 5 p.m. until 11pm
£7.00 per night, bring a warm jumper
F/F
Dominoes Toys (in High St) have some nice kites and a large
tissue hot air balloon kit. The store’s second floor toy
store also has the mildly famous Air Hogs, compressed air powered
aircraft. It comes with pump and is designed for outdoor use,
reports suggest it goes very well, for £23.
Bernard reports there was a poor turn out at the Alumwell scale indoor event. Nice flying by his sea planes and new mini cabin machine. New boy Lincoln is doing well, had some great flights from one of Bernard’s Depron/ KP00 designs. Simon had his experimental flying wing going – test bed for a twin motor steering flying wing with two or three 50mA cells. Dr Eric and friend had some nice flights, as did Eric with his red stick and tissue machine. Tom had some excellent flights from his 2mm foam Bearcat while Peter Smart flew his Co2 Be2…… and helicopter man too. Flight Hook came along with a new rubber powered kit – like a Butterfly but with wheels, called the Mayfly about £10. Young Andrew has another magazine article and plan out – AMI, yet again he has found a foreign plane I can’t spel.
Mark has a sketch of the Aeronutz motor thrust testing rig and the constant voltage charging system Mark and Simon use, send SAE for details.
NASA are selling their 7 motor high altitude surveillance aircraft flying wing thing. (maybe Santa will bring one – maybe Santa will use one!) Hello to the new folks who came along to have a look at modern indoor flying.
Mark’s collection of sticky tapes runs to an impressive 12 types, all sizes and colours, very helpful but surpassed by Simons string collection. Sad people? Not if you need just the right bit of tape or string! £Stretcher in Leicester (near the Grand Hotel) have those little kids paint brushes that are good for touching up bits of paint, 40p per pack. They also have a DC wall outlet, 300mA various voltages but not regulated – can be regulated with an LM317T? Worth a try for £3 me thinks.
Look out for Dave Ridgeway/Dave Boddington’s new mag – Model Flier.
Flight Hook have a new R/C park flyer from Potensky, The Junior weighs about 170gms, has a span of 860mm and costs about £49 with motor and speedo. Uses 5 to 7 cells. They also have the Chubby Lady (not very PC) which is about £40 and a fishing pole for about £20. call them for more details. At our last event we did not use the fishing pole once and the wall louvers kept out the brisk breeze. It was also noticeable that we only saw “scale” R/C planes, and a wide variety of machines too.
The city lending library have a new book on Co2 motors and models, while the city reference library have a very technical book on model aerodynamics – the laws of aerodynamics don’t seem to apply to indoor planes much such as Mark’s 6” span Rumpler ? Mark has some new small off/on switches £1.00 each, about 1/3 or a gram, 12v and 0.5 A Thanks for the stamps – much appreciated.
Melton’s Jet Jockey John has broken his ankle, (a clever move to spend more time building planes). Reports are that he has a sense of humour about it but you are not advised to refer to him as Long John or ask “where is your parrot”, “are you going to hop round the chippy”, “are you renting out your other shoe” It seems he had to jump out of an air stewardess bedroom window when her husband came home.
Park Flier.
Mark has successfully trimmed and flown his big 25” span three channel R/C triplane outdoors in still air conditions. It looks even slower outdoors and you can hardly hear it coming, goes quite high not so easy indoors however! Flight Hook have some new Park Fliers as do Simprop who have a few nice looking machines. All we need now is a park, and a still summers evening
R/C, I/R
Mark has been testing a twin motor steering system using direct drive motors. With four 50 mA cells, the two Tru Flight motors consume about 1.2A. Gearing down the props reduces the total load on the batteries and running the receiver and speed controller circuits from a voltage booster helps keep control until the cells are pretty much flat. Simon had terrific flights with the 15” span two channel triplane and his twin motor steering model which also has navigation lights.
ZTron are about to launch the IR twin steering Rx with speed controller and also the speed controller only (as seen in Mark’s Catalina/ 12” span Triplane) Mark has a new voltage booster (charge pump) working. If you want to boost up the voltage to run your electronic circuits you can get 3 to 5 volts and 17mA from one cell. Send a SAE for more details. It is to be used in his Catalina to run the Rx and speed controller circuits while the motors run from the cells via the transistor. The speed controller can be supplied as a kit and handles 1A., weighs about 1 gram.
The new Graupner 3.5g Rx is having production problems, so they are not yet available, but they will be quiet cheap compared to other micro Rx’s.
Dave Ridgeway had an interesting new two channel design which is easy to build and had flaps, all 2mm foam construction. Ray had some magnificent flights from his reliable new ducted fan slow fly Hunter jet, which uses heavy outdoor servos and Rx! Rob and Oliver flew their F/F electric converted to R/C Citibara while Geoff struggled with a new 22” span Avro 504. It is noticeable that the first “scale” foam indoor fliers are now being superseded by smaller two channel designs Don’t forget the 150g weight limit and that phase one slow fly machines are not allowed after 1st Jan (Wespe etc etc)
Design idea – outdoor slope soarer. Make a mini scale T tail glider. Use a really strong (heavy) wing that has a very high aspect ration, about 18” span. Thin wing airfoil to aid penetration. To keep the wing loading down it would have one WES Tech. 3g rudder servo and be powered by two or three 50mA cells and a voltage doubler (LT1613), Use a carbon wing? will the voltage doubler power the servo?
Sports Council have a new grant scheme for indoor aeromodelling “Grants of Bugger All” is published in 16 volumes and covers applications in Swedish, accountants reports, and a minimum grant of £50,000,000 paid retrospectively, but does not include travel expenses, hire fees, running costs, publicity or publishing/printing. All grants are paid to governing bodies.
ENDS.