No new photos...
From
Angus Mcleod@VERT/ANJO to
Digital Man on Thursday, July 07, 2005 00:26:00
Of course, as soon as I got it put together, the rain began to fall...
But it didn't rain too heavily and it didn't last too long. It left me
with a slightly damp strip and a cloudy sky, but strangely, the wind was steady and quite light, and the air was very smooth. So I took her up.
This aircraft will take some tweaking to get it right. Ground-handling
was not bad at all -- I was a little worried what with it being my first tail-dragger! But she went off quite smoothly, with very little "up" and
only the normal amount of "right" needed to keep control of the aircraft
on the ground. Up and away, and immediately I realised she was F-A-S-T!
I noticed that she liked a lot of "up" to keep the nose level, which might indicate a mis-adjusted elevator or insufficient down-thrust on the engine thrust-line. But the most noticable thing was the tendancy -- at least as
far as roll is concerned -- to do just exactly what you tell her to, even
if you didn't really mean it.
This aircraft is zero/zero/zero. Zero wing incidence, zero tail incidence
and zero dihedral. I'm accustomed to fairly high dihedral angles.
Dihedral acts like toe-in on your car. If you let go the wheel, the car
tends to straighten up. With dihedral, you center the controls, and the aircraft tends to level itself. No dihedral? Well then if you complete a maneuver with five degrees of bank, she is staying exactly like that until
you straighten it up manually. So there am I, making a turn. I usually
roll the plane over on one side and pull back on the stick (bank and
yank). As the plane makes the turn you keep the plane banked by holding
in a bit of aileron, to counter the self-righting tendancy of the wing dihedral.
But you don't want to do that with the Seabee. If you keep holding a bit
of aileron, she is going to keep rolling. And I kept finding myself
making a turn and the aircraft rolling over on her back, which was a bit
of excitement I didn't really need, because, well, did I tell you that she
was F-A-S-T?
Okay, so she's got this tendancy to over-roll (admittedly my finger is the problem, not the aeroplane). Also, she demands precision. If you want it
to complete the maneuver level, then you have to *fly* her level. And she also wants you to hold her up with your right thumb on the ELE stick. And
oh yes -- she's F-A-S-T!
Now, the motor wasn't working very well. I have to first of all tune the
carb to give me good power. Then I need to set the idle so she won't
actually *die* on you in the air (more in a moment). First she was idling much too fast, now it's too slow. Fortunately, I can adjust both of
those without taking tha cowl off again. But for all the surging of the engine, refusing to rev out much past about 10,000 RPM, the model still
proved to be F-A-S-T!
When doing a stall test, up high with the nose up and the engine throttled back, to see how bad the stall characteristics might be (no bad tendancies
at all) the engine quit on me. So my first landing with this, my first tail-dragger, was a dead-stick arrival. I don't think I mentioned it
before, but the model is F-A-S-T and as I made my approach, I could
actually hear it /hissing/ through the air like a Japanese sword, I kid
you not. (I don't say Katana because there is a model aircraft called a Katana...) She came in like greased lightening on rollerskates, flying so well that she didn't want to put her wheels on the ground. She's eaten up about half the strip before the rubber was rolling, but it was a text-book touchdown, and a round of applause was detected from the drunkards in the clubhouse.
I collected it from the strip and then went to change my shorts.
A second flight followed later, very similar to the first. A couple of
aborted takeoff attempts due to the engine not pulling strongly, having to taxi back and try again, before lifting of low and F-A-S-T and into a
turn. Several circuits, struggling not to over-control the turns, a
simple loop, (with Rudy shouting "Give us a three-turn spin" and me
ignoring him) then I thought I'd do an axial roll with the throttle at
about 2/3rds. I flicked the aileron over, thinking I'd stop it after she completed the roll. Uh-oh! She was on the *third* roll before I had
expected to be returning the controls to center! That was sweet! The
roll was very axial, and very snappy, and she came out of it very
precisely. I know what this aircraft needs -- a better pilot.
Just about then, throttling back to do another stall-test, the engine quit again, so landing #2 was another dead-stick job. It was another F-A-S-T,
flat approach, with the air /hissing/ over the airframe. She is F-A-S-T,
by the way, so I misjudged the base leg, and turned late on finals. She
moves F-A-S-T, which put her too far over to the left of the strip. I corrected by drifting her to the right, while concentrating on attitude,
since the 'flare' is not the same as for tricycle-gear. It was another beautiful approach and touch-down, but I'd over-corrected for the late
turn on finals, and as the wheels touched the ground, the right wing-tip
went over the edge of the strip, and brushed against the tall bush. The Seabee span around about three times, flat, like a frizbee, and came to
rest sitting on her undercarriage on the strip, with the engine in the
tall bush.
I retrieved her and wiped off the grass and leaves, but there wasn't even
the tiniest blemish in the covering to report.
So, two interesting and exciting flights, no serious mishaps, no injuries (despite the bush-cutting on the last landing). She is a real aerobat.
She goes where you tell her to, so you'd better tell her *right*. Rolls
like a dream. And by the way, she's F-A-S-T! Some tweaking and twiddling
to get her set up dead right, but I think she's going to be a keeper!
Unfortunately, this is *not* the type of aircraft you want to fly
one-handed while you take pictures......
---
þ Synchronet þ Made of wood and glue, but mostly glue!
From
Angus McLeod@VERT/ANJO to
Mindless Automaton on Thursday, September 15, 2005 00:44:00
Re: Re: No new photos...
By: Mindless Automaton to Angus McLeod on Wed Sep 14 2005 13:47:00
Are you strictly plane or have you tried any helicopters?
No, I'm not interested in helicopters. I know that they are very
challenging to fly, but they're boring. Like R/C cars, there is virtually
no construction involved. If you hit it you buy a whole bunch of new
parts and replace the broken ones. And they're yawnsville to watch in the air/ When a heli is doing it's greatest trick (hovering) it's standing
still. IOW, parked. Okay, it's parked 2 feet off the ground, but
parked is parked and it gets old FAST.
I really don't have a problem with *other* guys flying heli, but the
bloody things spend the entire flight whizzing about right over the strip (preventing other people from using it) and make a deafening racket in
your ears that makes it virtually impossible to hear your own engine while you're in flight. I honestly wish the heli pilots would go fly somewhere else, because they're a pain in the ass.
FYI Also, some links on http://www.anjo.com/rc/powerplants/ are busted. :(
Yep. :-/ One of these days I'm gonna FIX that website...
---
þ Synchronet þ Made of wood and glue, but mostly glue!
From
Angus McLeod@VERT/ANJO to
Mindless Automaton on Thursday, September 15, 2005 21:33:00
Re: Re: No new photos...
By: Mindless Automaton to Angus McLeod on Thu Sep 15 2005 12:56:00
Are you strictly plane or have you tried any helicopters?
When a heli is doing it's greatest trick (hovering) it's standing
still. IOW, parked. Okay, it's parked 2 feet off the ground, but parked is parked and it gets old FAST.
Maybe they are good for chasing the cat without ramming the fuselage up the.
I wouldn't mind a small electric heli to fly around in the house. It
would need a camera so I copuld follow it down the passage into the
kitchen, and a 'claw' so I could bring back extra ice-cubes for my drink!
Or a scale Sikorsky Skycrane
http://tinyurl.com/drl9w
carrying a scale 40' container in which is my scale GB-Z!
http://www.adrianpage.com/zsmall.jpg
Interesting.. ever try using model rockets as anti-aircraft weapons? ;)
I couldn't imagine how to design any guidance for that..
No, none of us are into shooting down the other. I suppose R/C rocketry
is doable, but nobody here is experimenting in that way.
I guess you could slap on a little cam and do some fly bys on the nudie beac something..
Oh yes, there are some very neat (somewhat expensive) systems for that.
I'd love to have a go, but funds are restricted right now. I've played
around with a cheap, disposable camera and got these shots of our
airfield:
http://www.anjo.com/rc/aircraft/kadet/ap/kadet.ap1.jpg
http://www.anjo.com/rc/aircraft/kadet/ap/kadet.ap2.jpg
http://www.anjo.com/rc/aircraft/kadet/ap/kadet.ap3.jpg
http://www.anjo.com/rc/aircraft/kadet/ap/kadet.ap4.jpg
http://www.anjo.com/rc/aircraft/kadet/ap/kadet.ap5.jpg
shooting sideways with my old Kadet (now deceased). Blurry -- next time
some anti-vibration damping has to go into the design. Photos with the
engine OFF were completely free of blurriness.
The only R/C I've own recently is one of those micros from Radio Shack. I o got it because I had a $20 gift certificate and figured what the heck. Otherwise when I was a kid I had a car that went forward and backwards to th right. :)
Cars and boats aren't really that much fun for me. I like the three
degrees of freedom that comes with R/C flight. And there are thousands of cool aeroplanes out there to model and fly. It isn't as difficult as
you'd think (although at first you are SURE that you'll *never* get the
hang of it) and it isn't that expensive either. You won't get into the
air for $20, but *easily* for $200...
---
þ Synchronet þ Made of wood and glue, but mostly glue!
