Patch News – August 2020

I suppose after all that’s happened in 2020 nothing should surprise me but the August weather still came as a bit of a shock. It varied from several days of unbearable heat with the highest temperature recorded for 17 years to 70mph gales and of course several storms. Halfway through the month the bullocks returned to the field but they are mostly not interested in us, requiring just an occasional shooing away if they get too nosey. Late in the month the bullocks went and sheep are expected, a first since we’ve had an electric fence so things might get interesting!There was lots of flying, mainly by the usual regulars, but young Charlie, Chris Winkworth (WingCo), and our latest recruit Richard Osborn all flew several times and seem to be getting on well and are learning fast.

This month we heard the very sad news that Ron Vears’ wife Rosemary passed away on 15^th August having bravely fought cancer for more than three years. Rosemary was a great supporter of Ron when he was our club Chairman for three years and she attended many of the club social events where she was always a happy and popular figure. Our thoughts are with Ron and we hope to see him flying with us again soon.

Several new models were flown during August, and the first I’ll feature shocked us all when it eventually made an appearance after about three years of building. Yes, Captain Slow’s Splot (or should it be called Splate?) has flown!It’s pretty much a standard Splot although Captain Slow has fitted ‘normal’ wingtips rather than the usual Splot endplates, thus increasing the span from 36” to 1m. The weight is 35ozs without the lipo. He is using a 3536 1000kv motor that he salvaged from his Durafly Ugly Stick and a 40A esc from a Wot4 Foam-E. Powered by a 2200mAh 3 cell lipo it swings an 11 x 5.5 prop and only pulls around 23A so the Captain should get decent flight times. He has stuck to the original single centre mounted servo on the ailerons and soldered up his own rock solid undercarriage. After such a long wait, tales of woe, problems with various types of covering and more, the flight was an anti-climax, it just flew as it should with just a little trim needed. I think it will become a firm favourite although maybe it’s a bit too quick for Captain Slow’s sedentary ways! You can see some of the first flight in this month’s video.

Page Boy first flew his Slec Fun Fly on 31^st July, too late for the last Patch News. Page Boy says the laser cut kit was perfect and, although he was surprised to see so many lite-ply parts, the final weight came out at 4lbs which is fine. He is using a Turnigy G25 motor fitted with a 12 x 6 propeller and a 60A Hobbywing speed controller all powered by a 4 cell 2650mAh lipo. Page Boy originally bought some Futaba S3003 servos on eBay only to discover that they were fakes so he binned them and bought some standard sized metal geared ones from 4-Max instead.The covering is HobbyKing green and white film and he intends to add some trim later. I think the ‘cockpit’ needs to be black, it would look much nicer. The first flight went well and Page Boy seemed very happy with the performance.

Page Boy also flew a Wingnetic that he won in a club raffle ages ago but has only just got round to putting together. The maiden flight went well, in fact Page Boy said the Wingnetic flew better than he had expected, excellent.

When WingCo first came to see us he brought along a model that he had built. We checked it over and declined to fly it until it had been fitted with ailerons as we didn’t rate it’s chances very highly with just rudder and elevator controls. WingCo duly went away and fitted ailerons as suggested and also a rather large castoring tailwheel.Dougal Entendre was given the dubious honour of doing the first flight which proved ‘interesting’! Initially Dougal had trouble getting the model off the ground (he blames the tailwheel) and once it was in the air he had trouble trimming the ailerons. He soon realised the ailerons weren’t working as they should so quickly landed and then discovered that the linkage to the port wing aileron had come undone. Dougal did well to get it down safely without any damage so with the problems sorted it should be fine next time out. WingCo is also putting a trainer together.

Kryten captured this great shot of Dougal’s FPV Skyfun whizzing past John Warren’s Jocasta. “Coming through”!Dougal also captured some nice air-to-air screenshots of others members’ models from his FPV video footage.

Mini-Mike had a bit of a moment with his large scale P.68 Partenavia Victor one day. He had just taken off when suddenly both motors cut but fortunately he got down safely with no damage to the plane. On investigation Mini-Mike realised what had happened and confessed that when he intended to raise the flaps he’d hit the wrong switch and turned on Throttle Cut instead. Now what sort of idiot would do make an elementary stupid mistake like that…says the man who has done exactly the same thing with his own Avios BushMule…twice!

One model that didn’t survive the month was John Warren’s Albatross. The model has had rather a chequered history with several crashes and rebuilds. I’ve flown it several times and it’s flown well enough although I think it was a step too far for John’s piloting skills. John brought it along following the latest rebuild and asked me to test fly and trim the model. It took off ok although it needed quite a lot of aileron trim but when I began a fairly gentle right hand turn the starboard bottom wing abruptly failed, dropping down by about 30 degrees.I’ve never seen a wing fold downwards before, no idea what broke. Apparently, unseen by me, John had been repairing one of the interplane struts prior to the flight so I imagine that was a factor. There was nothing I could do and the Albatross spun in and was terminally damaged. It’s a shame as the model had looked good in the air on previous flights although, as can be seen in one of Kryten’s photos, it was prone to a variety of inflight failures.Look closely and you’ll see a trailing rigging wire as well as the more obvious loose tyre. Not to be defeated John has already started building a replacement Albatross, let’s hope he builds in some more quality this time.

On a more cheerful note Woody (or Major Disaster as Captain Slow now calls him) has built a rather nice Tucano from a Phoenix Model Products kit. He has fitted a Ripmax Quantum 25 motor, a 60A speed controller and an 11 x 7 prop. It runs on a standard 3 cell lipo in the 2200 to 3000mAh range and weighs around 3 1/2lbs with the battery. Woody chose the colour scheme of the RAF Tucano Display Team aircraft ZF448 and it looks very smart in mostly black but with some yellow trim. The test flight went very well with no problems. Just don’t mention bananas…It’s a lovely flier, quite gentle but fully aerobatic with no vices so it should prove to be the ideal model for Woody.

We had an interesting moment at the field one day when Dougal and 1066 decided to do some synchronised flying with their electric gliders. Dougal was using his Multiplex Blizzard and 1066 his ST Models Blaze, a pair that are reasonably well matched for flying together. Unfortunately they only got as far as pulling up to climb and turn at the end of the first pass when they collided! I don’t think of either of them was particularly at fault so I’ll blame them both equally. Immediately after they touched Dougal realised he had a control problem but he made it back to the patch and landed safely. 1066 on the other hand seemed to have full control but no power so he had to land out.When we looked at the damage we found that Dougal’s Blizzard had one aileron hanging off and the control linkage to that aileron has disappeared, while on 1066’s Blaze the whole nose complete with the motor was hanging off. Presumably the Blaze prop had hit the Blizzard’s aileron linkage which broke half the prop and the ensuing vibration tore the whole nose off! Fortunately both models were easily repaired and were soon flying again…but not together.

Rumour has it that 1066 also had another very near miss but this time without any damage. Apparently, one day when I was absent, he did a low inverted pass with one of his foam 3D machines in the normal ‘I can get lower than you can’ way when he actually scraped the fin along the ground before climbing safely away! Sadly nobody has any photographic proof of this event so I’ve asked 1066 to repeat it for me to film but so far he’s declined…chicken!

Newbie Richard Osborn has been looked after mostly by Page Boy and is learning quickly with his Wot4 Foam-E.Chas has also watched over Richard for a few flights, an experience that I think they both enjoyed.

I spotted this in a free paper the other day about the Coastguard trialling drones for search and rescue missions: Although we don’t fly drones the general public and government seem to link model aircraft to drones so any positive publicity for drones can only be a good thing, it makes a change from the bad press they normally get.

Recently I’ve been posting photos of the build of Dwayne Pipe’s latest edf model, a Folland Gnat. Dwayne drew his own plans for the Gnat, scaling everything up from an Airfix plastic kit that he’d been given for Christmas.The Gnat is 36” span and also 36” long, Dwayne confesses that he has increased the size of the wings and tail by 20% to reduce the wing loading. The completed model weighs 2lb 15oz with a 4 cell pack which gives a wing loading of 20.6oz/sq. ft. Power is provided by a 12 bladed 70mm fan from Banggood coupled to a HobbyKing 80A speed controller and this gives 2lb 4oz of thrust and pulls 50A. This month Dwayne got the Gnat all finished in a nice Red Arrows colour scheme and asked me to do the test flight. He was unsure if there would be enough power using a 4 cell lipo so he had set the model up to take either 4 or 6 cells. To me 4 cells felt to be providing enough thrust so we decided to do the first flight with that. Dwayne launched the Gnat and it simply climbed away with just a little down trim being needed. The Gnat performed the usual rolls, loops, stall turns, and inverted with no problem at all so after four very enjoyable minutes I landed it safely back on the patch and declared the model to be a triumph.Unusually Dwayne flies Mode 3 so I had lent him a Multiplex receiver and set the Gnat up on my transmitter in my usual Mode 2. Alongside my Multiplex receiver Dwayne fitted one of his Futaba receivers so after I had trimmed the Gnat he simply swapped the servo leads from my receiver to his own, copied the trim settings to his transmitter and flew the model himself, simples. The only minor problem Dwayne had was that when landing he found the Gnat floated on more than he had expected and he overshot the patch. Not a problem, the Gnat landed gently. But… Dwayne was in for a shock when he retrieved it…remember the bullocks were in the field! The Gnat had skidded through some very fresh poo which filled both air intakes! In this month’s video you’ll see snippets of both flights.

Kryten sent me lots of his superb flying shots this month, some of which you can see below. I update the cover photo of the club Facebook page most weeks and this week I used one that Kryten had taken of my Stearman.BMFA then posted it on their Facebook site, giving us a free plug and web link. It’s already had almost 2000 views! Video time now, this month with additional contributions from Dougal Entendre and Captain Slow, thanks guys. Please watch the video full-screen, it’s so much better with small models flying around.If the video won’t play for you please click HERE

A huge military Lockheed C-5 Galaxy was sitting on the tarmac near a little Cessna that was waiting to take off.
The Cessna pilot was rather nervous of the C-5 and asked the tower to check the intentions of the military plane.
Before the tower could reply the C-5’s huge nose cargo doors opened and a voice came over the radio booming:
“I’M GOING TO EAT YOU!” 

Colin Cowplain