Patch News – August 2012

Well the weather has picked up since I wrote last which means our excellent farmer has finally been able to cut his field. Once the grass (very long by this time) had had a few days of sunshine the farmhands managed to cut, turn, and bale the crop in record time. Those of us that flew each day while this was going on really appreciated how George and his men went out of their way to help us keep flying and even changed their harvesting pattern in the field so they didn’t interfere with our flying! We really do owe George and his men a huge thank you, we are incredibly lucky to have such good friends on our side
🙂

Quite a lot has happened at the patch, several new models have appeared, and a few older ones have ‘disappeared’! Nick Sivertsen finally managed the get the A4 Skyhawk flying. Nick said it’s about 5 years old but had never flown. He brought it up on a perfect test flying day and spent quite a time setting up a launch ramp and bungee system, and going through final checks of CG, radio range, control surface movements, heart tablets etc! Eventually he was happy with everything…well as happy as he was ever going to be…and stretched the bungee to the correct (incredibly high I thought) tension and attached it to the launch ramp. It was at just this extremely tense moment in the proceedings that Keith Evans decided to “see what this pedal does”! He found out very rapidly when the bungee shot off at high speed towards Nick at the anchored end! Fortunately it missed Nick and even more fortunately the model wasn’t on the ramp at the time. Nick said something like “Gosh” and muttered lots while the rest of us fell about laughing…

After a short delay and more heart tablets the Skyhawk was finally wrenched skywards, and it flew beautifully. Much too twitchy on ailerons but otherwise perfect, and it looked great in the air. I’m sure it doesn’t need such a violent launch as it flew quite happily on half throttle, and it landed fairly slowly even on a calm day. Well done Nick, we look forward to watching many more flights with detuned ailerons.

Nick has also got his Fantrainer flying well now on 3 cells instead of 4, after a motor swap and the addition of a heatsink . Yes, it is a scale model: http://www.fanjetaviation.com/

One model that ‘disappeared’ a few weeks ago was Woody’s F-18 Hornet. He had brought it to a club meeting and showed off it’s lighting system which included throttle linked ‘afterburners’ but sadly on it’s first flight it lost one wing when I did a reversal (it wasn’t a tight one honest guv!). However it had been flying well until that moment so Woody collected up the thirty something pieces of EPS and passed them over to the most experienced repairman in the club, Mick H. After a few weeks the Hornet re-appeared looking good as new and with a stronger wing joint. It now flies very well and Woody loves playing the Top Gun theme on his mobile as Maverick streaks by! He is gradually getting used to flying it and barely shakes at all now when I hand him the transmitter!

Jim Hobday’s Eflite Pulse isn’t actually a re-appearance as the original model was beyond repair when Jim discovered the Pulse was a step too far up his learning curve. After gaining some more experience on his Eflite Advance he has invested in another Pulse and this time he is happily flying it without problems. I must say that Eflite do seem to make good quality, well sorted models.

Tony Neal’s Durafly Vampire didn’t disappear, but the Ubec did, through the fan when he was bench testing the set-up! This unfortunate incident demonstrated that EDF’s suck from the front just as much as they blow from the back, and it destroyed the Ubec, fan, and motor. Having replaced these items Tony’s Vampire is now flying extremely well, it’s definitely one of the nicer flying EDF’s. Sadly I forgot to photograph it but hey, it looks like a Vampire, and who wants to see a picture of Tony?!


Multiple Models Montague has been at it again and now I’ve completely lost touch with all of his models. The number of crashes has certainly dropped as Steve’s flying has come on in leaps and bounds, although there have been a couple of moments. His Seagull Edge is no more and a larger Extra has had a new fuselage. He has also got a 42″ Slick designed by Andrew Jesky, look here if you don’t know about him: http://andrewjesky.weebly.com/ it’s a very very good 3D machine. So much so that Steve has a larger 51″ Slick on the way!

Another arrival is Bob Hill’s Lander Hunter from HobbyKing. It’s the same model as Mick’s Hunter but unlike Mick, Bob bought the bare airframe rather than the version that comes with the motor, fan, and retracts. So he sourced a Lander fan and motor to suit 4 cells (Mick uses 6 cells) from Overlander. He was aware that things seemed to get a bit hot on a brief test run but thought it would be ok at flying speed. But just over 2 mins into the flight the motor suddenly quit, exactly as Mick’s did on it’s first flight! The fan unit was removed and the motor appeared to have cooked, no magnetic field left at all, just like Mick’s. It all seems very odd, the two models use different motors and a different number of cells, yet both failed in identical manner. The good news is that it flew beautifully and survived the forced deadstick landing without damage so it will fly again once Bob has sorted out another motor. Mick’s Hunter is now fitted with a HET motor and has had lots of problem free flights.

And so onto the tale of Hapless Harper…Mick’s recent problems began last week when he was flying his much loved Hyperion Yak 54 with a newly repositioned u/c. The view from the pits saw and heard the Yak scream into terra firma almost vertically a few hundred yards down the field, at which point Mick turned to Steve M (the only other person flying) and say “What happened?” Steve replied “I don’t know, I’m flying my model”. It was interesting to watch as they both carried on flying Steve’s model until the awful truth dawned on Mick! It seems Mick glanced down at the trims and picked up the wrong one when he looked up again. Sadly the Yak was well and truly totalled as were two brand new batteries, but happily Mick is looking at buying an identical replacement.

In the meantime Mick dusted off his old 3D machine, but… on Sunday Steve H suddenly shouted from the pits that Mick was very close to the only clump of trees at the top of the valley. Mick, thinking Steve was just shouting the usual micky taking verbal, responded in the time honoured fashion of abuse and flew another almost identical circuit. I say almost identical because it must have been just a few feet lower… I needn’t go into detail of the result
🙁

I had to leave while recovery was ongoing but I did manage to snap a picture of the initial attempt. Fortunately we managed to talk Mick out of climbing further and the last I saw involved a heavy weight and length of rope!

Taxiing down the tarmac, the 747 abruptly stopped, turned around and returned to the gate. After a two hour delay, it finally took off.
A worried passenger asked the steward, ‘What was the problem?’
‘The pilot was bothered by a noise he heard in the engine’, explained the flight attendant, ‘and it took us a while to find a new pilot.’

Colin Cowplain