It’s spring, hurrah! Well it is according to the meteorological calendar anyway which says spring starts on 1st March although the astronomical spring apparently begins around 21st March Why am I mentioning this? In the vain hope that we see a change from what has been a very wet February, one of the wettest Februarys on record I believe. As well as limiting our flying somewhat the rain has made the parking area at the new site very muddy and the regulars fliers have been moaning about their filthy cars and their struggles not to make the inside as muddy as the outside. Chairman Gordon Bennett is going to have a word with the farmers to see if something can be done to improve the parking area but the situation should improve once the weather becomes more amenable .
Members did manage some flying in February and apart from the muddy parking area everything has been going well at the new site, the pilots are getting used to the different layout and necessary landing approach. The much larger patch is a real bonus and, as Gordon pointed out at the AGM, when landing on the previous 30m diameter patch you only actually got 30m if the model was exactly on the centreline. On the new 40m x 30m patch the absolute shortest run is 30m and diagonally corner to corner it’s actually 50m.
The small trees to the east of the patch don’t pose much of a hazard on landing, there are gaps between them so it’s easy enough to fly over or between them. On the old patch we got used to trying to land on the first few feet of the circle as the run was so short but now we can come over the trees at a reasonable height and then drop down to land in the middle of the patch with plenty of the strip left. The air does seem to get quite bumpy between the trees and the end of the patch so it’s best not to be too low there anyway.
Five members got the mowers out on 28th February and cut the patch. The weather may have been very wet but it’s also been warm enough to make the grass grow a fair bit.
There are sheep in the field at the moment but they haven’t come anywhere near us so far. The farmer has put their feed station close to our pits area so there are a few droppings around but that’s a pretty minor problem and much better than bullocks droppings.
I went to have a look at our old field the other day and, as you can see in the photo below, it has obviously been sprayed with something to kill off the grass as it’s now turned yellow. 
Oddly there is a strip of healthy looking green grass right up through the middle, maybe they simply missed that part but it seems unlikely. The lower field has also been sprayed so presumably the third one has as well but I didn’t drive down the track to look at that one.
The only casualty of the trees so far was a bit of a surprise as it was Dougal Entendre!
To be fair I should explain that he wasn’t on a landing approach at all, he was ‘doing a Dougal’ i.e. a low inverted pass. He had rolled his little MX2 inverted on the downwind leg of the circuit and was on the base leg when he suddenly lost it. I don’t know if Dougal was caught out by a bit of turbulence or if was simply pilot error but the model suddenly decided it wasn’t going to turn onto finals and flew straight into the nearest tree. Fortunately for us (but unfortunately for Dougal) I was filming at the time so you can enjoy the moment in this month’s video! It looks to me as if the MX2 arrived in the slightly turbulent area at too slow a speed but whatever the problem was we all enjoyed the result! 
Once we’d stopped laughing at his misfortune we helped retrieve the plane. It didn’t seem to suffer much damage when it hit the tree but more occurred during the retrieval process. 
The trees are Hawthorns, so rather prickly, spikey things which don’t do lightweight foamies any favours but eventually the MX2 was recovered although it looked rather tatty.
So, after many years at our previous field where we had Harper’s Oak (which was named after Mick Harper, an old club chairman who had a bad run in with the tree) we now have ‘Dougal’s Dogwood’, a name that will probably also last for many years unless 1066 manages to hit it when we can give it the more correct name of ‘Hastings Hawthorn’.
It was good to see Norwegian Nick come and fly a new model at the new field, an SR-71 Blackbird foamie. He’s flown an SR-71 Blackbird foamie before but this is a new version. 
Nick built his from a plan drawn up by Laddie Mikulasko which is available from Sarik Hobbies. They offer three different deals, you can buy the plan and magazine article for £16, or a laser cut Depron pack for £11, or a short kit containing the plan, the magazine article, and the laser cut pack for £24. This is the description from the Sarik Hobbies website: Designed by Laddie Mikulasko, this is a quick and easy 693 mm span electric profile sport-scale build from the CAD drawn large single sheet plan. All Depron construction with some balsa and spruce strip, and uses an economical BL2212/06 2200KV motor, 40 Amp ESC and 3S 3000 Lipo with a 6″x4″ in. APC-E prop.
At 693mm span and 1270mm long Nick’s model is actually quite large for a foamie. It weighs 500gms and uses three channels, having elevons and throttle but no rudder. Nick has fitted a 2212/06 2200kv motor which swings a 6×4 APC prop as suggested. He’s using a 30A speed controller and is powering it with a 2200mAh 3 cell lipo battery. The difference between this Blackbird and his previous one is that for this one Nick used genuine Depron as the earlier model was rather lacking torsional stiffness and strength. 
To finish the white Depron Nick sprayed the whole model matt black with Rust-Oleum paint from B&Q. The model flew beautifully, it looks really good in the air and looks to be quite a stable platform unlike some of the foamboard jets that several of us fly. I managed to take some quite good video of the first flight which you can see in this month’s video.
If you fancy building one for yourself Nick is happy to loan out the templates so all you need is to draw round them straight onto a sheet of Depron and get cutting and gluing. At the time of writing Leo has borrowed the templates and I know he’s searching out some Depron so we should see at least one more Blackbird flying soon. No doubt he’ll quickly hand them on to the next in the queue so we could have a squadron of them before long.
Gordon Bennett had some problems with his foamie Acro Wot in February. One day he was flying it at the same time MacFly was flying his Ruckus and Gordon got the models confused and said to MacFly that he’d been flying the wrong model for a few seconds. Then he watched as the Ruckus flew into the ground…only it wasn’t the Ruckus! A sort of double bluff, “I thought I was wrong but I was right all the time” thing. The damage wasn’t too bad, fuselage broken behind the wing, rather bent nose and so on but Gordon repaired it and it looked fine. Next time he flew it the Acro Wot seemed to gradually develop a mind of its own and Gordon moaned a lot about turbulence upsetting it. He got it down in one piece and checked everything over but it seemed alright so he flew it again. But this time it was really bad and he lost control and crashed again, this time breaking off the nose.
Then Gordon discovered that the rudder horn was broken and he decided that was obviously what had been causing the odd flying characteristics. Cursing himself for not spotting it before the crash he got on and repaired the nose and replaced the rudder horn.
Back to the field for another try where Gordon did very thorough checks including a range check and ensuring there were no unintended mixers and everything else he could think of. Content that everything was perfect he took-off and immediately knew something was wrong and landed safely just off the end of the patch. So he asked me to check it out and I found exactly the same, everything looked ok but when I took off I needed a lot of right rudder to hold it straight so I chopped the power and landed just off the strip. Thinking there may be a control mix linked to the throttle we checked it out at full throttle and immediately saw that the stick on trim (decal) on the left wing was peeling back, especially where it was at it’s widest towards the wingtip, which was creating a huge amount of drag. 
Gordon pulled off the trim and we tried again. This time everything was perfect and the Acro Wot flew just as well as it always had. That was definitely a lesson learned, if something doesn’t feel right make sure there isn’t a piece of stick on trim coming loose.
Mini-Mike has been quite productive in the model room recently and following on from refurbishing his Acro Wot he’s built a Mirus. Some of you will have seen 1066’s Mirus that he’s built in various guises, I think 1066 is harking back to his youth when he used to fly with the Ken Stokes Mirus Display Team. Nostalgia’s not what it used to be…
Back to Mini-Mike, he bought a Mirus 25 kit from NJR Modelling for £89.90, this is what the website says about it: The Mirus was designed in the early ’80’s by the late Ken Stokes as an easy build fast sports model. Since acquiring the design, we have re-engineered the kits to utilise modern CNC and laser cutting technology, which in turn makes for a stronger model that is still very easy to build. It was then, and is now available again in two sizes for I/C engines, a .25 size and a .40 size. We are working on an electric power option for both sizes of model which we hope to be able to release soon.
The Mirus 40 is 39.5” span and the 25 is 37” so there’s not a huge size difference. According to the website they both weigh 3kg but that must be a typo, possibly 3lb for the larger one but certainly not 3kg. Mini-Mike has made his electric powered and has fitted an 8×6 prop on a Tornado Thumper 3536 1500kv motor as used in E2k pylon racing.
He’s mounted the motor on 3mm threaded rod stand-offs from the firewall to bring it to the correct position. The speed controller is 50A and the battery a four cell 2200mAh lipo.
All three servos are JX digital metal geared with the two wing mounted ones for the ailerons being slim versions, and the receiver is a Hitec Optima. Mike used Ripmax Aerofilm for the covering and reckons it’s the best one he’s used. It certainly looks good in the photos, I just hope the red with white on both the top and bottom surfaces is different enough to see in the air. There’s more white trim on the underside so it should be alright.
So how does it fly? Unfortunately nobody has any idea at the moment as since Mike completed the model the February weather hasn’t been good enough to test fly the Mirus but hopefully he’ll be able to fly it early in March. Watch this space for a flying report.
The photos this month are all taken from videos so not the best quality I’m afraid:
Video time now, this month with content shot by myself, MacFly, and Dougal.
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
Confucius say:
Man who leaps out of aeroplane without parachute is jumping to conclusion…
Colin Cowplain
Great work as always Patsie.
Cheers 1066 🙂