Patch News – March 2018

Wow, this month seems to have flown by, we’ve had the meteorological spring (1 March), the astronomical spring (20 March) and the start of British Summer Time (25 March). We’ve had a few cracking spring days but also some very wintry days and the flying has been ‘interesting’ on several occasions because of bitingly cold winds. But many of the members have flown during the month, some of us quite a lot, and I’ve got loads of material for this Patch News. In the February Patch News I said ‘It could have been worse’ and included a photo taken in Feb 2012 of my Twister in the snow. I should have known better, the next few photos were taken on 18 March.Insanity prevailed and I was joined by Captain Slow and Woody. What the photos don’t show was the howling gale that was blowing the snow right across the field. The anemometer showed that the wind was gusting over 30mph.

Captain Slow quite correctly said that we were only there for the bragging rights and as it turned out, he won them. He flew his red and white Obelix for a few minutes without too much trouble and then I flew my nearly all white FunGlider. I soon discovered that a white model doesn’t stand out too well in a snowstorm! It was ok for most of the flight when I was able to keep it close in, in front of me, but when I turned downwind on the landing circuit I really struggled to see it. With it coming towards me there was a very small frontal area to spot through the snow and I got completely disorientated and of course it got blown downwind making it even harder to see. Very soon neither Woody nor I could see it at all and I had to assume it had crashed. After a short search by all three of us we found it near the far side of the lower field and unsurprisingly it was quite badly damaged.However, as is often the case, back home on the workbench it all went back together pretty well and it was flying perfectly again a couple of days later, none the worse for it’s misadventure.

But we were in for a treat one weekday morning when just Gentleman Jim and I were present.  We had heard an interesting sounding large aircraft flying around but hadn’t seen anything until suddenly this appeared!It just did one quick pass but I managed to snap one poor quality photo. Apparently is was displaying at Goodwood.

Several new models made an appearance in March, the first one being Gentleman Jim’s gorgeous Multiplex Solius.

This is how the website describes it: Airborne elegance! High performance electric glider with T-tail, cockpit and clear canopy. With its pleasant handling and excellent performance the Solius offers tremendous flying pleasure to anyone from the weekend flyer to the pro-standard pilot. Whether you’re looking for long gliding flights or lively aerobatics – the Solius always gives a good account of itself. The outstanding features of this Elapor model are its many new, innovative and sophisticated details, which set entirely new standards for this class of model.The 2160mm (85”) span Solius is available either as a kit or Ready to Run (RR) which comes with the servos, motor, prop, and speed controller already fitted. They also sell a RR+ version that comes fitted with a Multiplex 5 channel receiver and a 2200mAh lipo, so you just charge the battery, bind to your Multiplex transmitter, and fly. Jim bought the kit version which meant he had quite a lot of gluing and installing to do but the effort was worth it, the Solius is a great flier. It has the usual ailerons, elevator, rudder, and throttle, and Jim has programmed in spoilerons as well. This raises both ailerons to spoil the lift and make landing easier but I must say it does seem to float on and on even with spoilerons activated. Jim has also fitted telemetry and speech units to his Hitec radio so he gets vario bleeps to let him know if the model is rising or sinking and spoken altitude reports at regular intervals, all clever stuff. You can see some of the first flight in this month’s video.

One model that I honestly didn’t expect to see again was Chuck Berry’s E-Flight Sukhoi. (He prefers his childhood nickname Chuck to Goose). He had a bit of a mishap with the Sukhoi a few weeks ago and we all thought it was a write-off but he tells me that when he got home his wife April suggested he had a go at repairing it. Once he got started he found it went back together quite easily and as you can see it’s now looking as good as new. Only on the inside can you see some minor tell-tale signs of where the hot glue did its’ work.

There were a couple of mishaps during March that will require some serious work, maybe Bob the Builder and Modelling Clay should ask Chuck Berry for a few tips on repairing. Modelling’s mishap is in this months’ video.

My old friend Dave Durnford from the Alton club was good enough to write an article for Patch News about his recent visit to the Paul Heckles Flight Centre: Back To School – Models & Flying Tuition by Dave Durnford

There are many ways to learn to fly model aircraft, and as many and more model types used in the process. In the halcyon days of our hobby, when almost every town had a model shop, R/C trainer model kits were a plenty and balsa readily available should you chose to build from a plan.

I would suggest nowadays the newcomer has a more limited and less easy choice. At time of writing, this might be summarised as what wholesalers Ripmax / Perkins etc. are currently distributing to the few remaining shops. Otherwise it’s an online order to the likes of Hobby King for a RTF model.

As a club instructor, I get to see all types of ‘perfect’ trainer as supplied by the various outlets. Some are better than others, both in terms of quality and suitability. No doubt there are one or two, (somewhere?), that learnt on a scale ‘Spitfire’ or ‘F3A’ pattern ship but most of us cut our flying teeth on a high wing trainer of some description. Looking around at the models presently available that fit the bill, I was a little disappointed. I then remembered the professional model flying tuition, what model(s) do they use? Surely they must have seen it all and know what works and is durable to withstand the newbie’s bumps ‘n knocks.

So my enquiries lead me to Paul Heckles Flight Centre located at Draycott Aerodrome, near Swindon. Their website (CLICK HERE) describes the operation and includes photos of the superb flying site used.

I made a visit to Paul to see for myself the models he uses for training.

For fixed wing training, (the school also teaches rotary), the Flair / A.T.S. ‘Kite’ is the stalwart aircraft in their fleet.Despite all the knocks and ‘heavy arrivals’, very few airframes have been totalled in all their years of operation. Unfortunately, this model kit is no longer in production and after speaking to Justin at the current Flair Models in Warwick, unlikely to be in the near future. All is not lost though as foam wings are available from ‘Bill Kits’ and fibre glass cowling & carbon u/c from ‘Carbon Copy’. As for a plan, there never was one, so I’m doing my best to draw something up from existing airframes.

Tuition – Paul gave me a tip into his proven successful approach.

This might be summed up as always seeing and maintaining a fixed horizon. Just think of trying to fly a model whist straining up and peering at a blank sky. What attitude is the model at? Is it climbing? Descending? Banked? Not easy to say without a reference i.e. a horizon be that the ground or a line of trees, always kept in the peripheral of your vision. Thinking about it, it works for me, how about you?

So what model would you recommend for a newcomer to our great hobby?

Thanks Dave, that’s all good stuff.

Stanley Knife recently dug deep into his pockets and splashed out a fiver on a new receiver. Yes, that’s right, just £5. I think he said it’s a Redcon CM703 2.4G 7CH DSM2 DSMX Compatible Receiver from Bang Good but I’m not certain. Not wishing to risk an expensive model to check out such a cheap new receiver Stanley then splashed the cash again, this time on a Flite Test Bloody Baron from Sussex Model Centre.The 29” (737mm) span Bloody Baron is a sort of Fokker/Ugly Stick lookalike that’s made from water resistant foam board. As you can see it’s a very basic quick to build four channel chuck it in the back of the car type of model and Stanley chose to fit a Turnigy 26-36 1100Kv motor coupled to a 40A esc. The model spec says to use a minimum 3 cell lipo so Stanley is using 4 cell 1000 lipo and an 8×6 prop which gives plenty of power. The first flight went perfectly and looked like a lot of fun so Stanley let me have the second flight. It flies really well, much better than you have a right to expect for a few pieces of foam board, and the only problem I found was that it didn’t seem to have enough up elevator movement. As I landed I was holding in full up elevator and even that was barely enough. We checked out the movement and found the problem, the elevator servo had come loose! Oh, and that £5 receiver? It worked perfectly so I reckon that was a bargain.

I know I barely mention it so you’ve probably not noticed but I’m a Multiplex fan, as is Captain Slow. But the other day I began to wonder if we were getting a little too similar in our ways as it’s not just the transmitters we have in common. I snapped this photo to illustrate my point:If fellow Multiplex users Woody and Percy Vears also turn up with FunGliders and twin finned flying wings I’ll really begin to worry. And Chuck Berry has now got an MPX Cockpit SX9 on order…

Other transmitters are available of course and Dougal Entendre (AKA Tranny Agate) has many many different ones. Fancying a bit of retro rc he decided to convert one of his collection to 2.4 GHz and eventually chose one of his several Devo sets as the donor and an American 72 MHz Royal transmitter as the recipient. With my blissfully small knowledge of electronics I thought it would be a very straightforward task to swap the innards from one transmitter into another case but it seems it’s not that simple. At a recent club meeting Dougal gave us a presentation of the conversion and the various problems he encountered along the way. One of the things that happened when transmitters were computerised was the change from mechanical to electronic trims and Dougal wanted to keep the original stick units along with their mechanical trims in the Royal tx. This involved quite a lot of head scratching and mechanical engineering but eventually he cracked it and thought he’d overcome the worst of the problems.But when he switched on for the first test he discovered that the electronic output from Royal stick units was much less than from the modern Devo ones which resulted in much reduced movement of the servos. More head scratching soon had the problem solved and all worked well so then it was down to mounting the new electronics and a modern lipo battery in the old case. Modern transmitters all have a screen to display the various available menus for setting the model up and in the retro transmitter this needs to be hidden but easily accessible so Dougal mounted it inside, rear facing, and then made the rear cover quickly removable.One thing considered vital these days, especially for electric flight, is a throttle lock switch and that had to be mounted on the outside of the case but other than that the only external differences are the stubby 2.4GHx aerial and the addition of a neck strap attachment ring. Having satisfied himself that everything was working as it should Dougal chose his Hummer for the test flights and, as expected, it performed perfectly.Well done Dougal, an interesting and well executed project.

The winner of the latest Patch News caption competition was chosen by a poll of the members at the last meeting in March and the chosen one was…insert drum roll here…Page Boy! The winning caption was ‘Apparently 1066 thinks he has to go through a gate (Agate) to get to Hastings.’ Congratulations to Page Boy who received a 3 cell 2200mAh 40C lipo for his efforts. Told you it was worth entering!

As well as entering caption comps Page Boy has been busy building more models. He’s already completed two Mini Blitz club models and now has a Dawn Flyer almost completed. The four channel 48” span Dawn Flyer was a free plan in RCM&E, and was designed by Lindsay Todd for a motor that puts out around 300W of power. Page Boy is hoping the finished weight will be around 2-1/2 to 3 lb so a Turnigy 3536 1200kv motor, coupled to a Plush 60A esc and a 3s 2200mAh lipo should be ample. To make life a little easier he ordered a £23 CNC cut wood pack from SLEC which contained the ribs, formers, and ply parts. The fuselage will be mostly stained whilst the wing and tail feathers will be covered in antique Solartex so the final look will be something like this one:

A link I spotted whilst browsing the HobbyKing website recently provides some useful information on lipo safety. It’s well worth a read, personally I was unaware that the salt water treatment is a myth. You can read it HERE

The last new model to fly this month was a Prime Jet Pro that Kryten won in a recent club raffle.It’s a flying wing with fixed canards from the HobbyKing Glue-N-Go series and is made from laser cut foam board with some carbon fibre reinforcing rods. It looks very smart, Kryten certainly made a good job of building it and fitting a Turnigy 2826 2200Kv motor powered by an 1800mAh 3 cell lipo. He said the instructions were a bit rubbish.There was no indication of any reflex required and he was unsure about the C of G position. The instructions say it’s marked on the canopy but it isn’t so he so he used a position suggested on a forum. Having been asked to do the first flight I can safely say it was wrong! It was most peculiar to fly, the first thing being that it had far too much reflex so I had to use all available down trim. But even while I was adjusting the trim the model would suddenly tuck under with no warning, almost doing a half outside loop with no stick input at all! I quickly switched from mid rates to low rates in an effort to calm things down and more by luck than judgement I got it back on the ground safely.We decided the cause was a rearward CG so we added a lump of lead in the nose, guessing the amount required. The result was a transformation, the next flight was a pleasure, and I soon switched up to full rates. There was a large trim change when the throttle was opened but that can easily be sorted with some throttle/elevator mixing, and apart from that it flew very well.  I look forward to flying it again as, once the throttle/elevator mixing is sorted, I’m sure it will be a great little flier. Kryten managed to take a very short piece of video during the second flight, you can see it in this month’s video.

Kryten also snapped some quality stills with his decent camera this month including a great shot of a kite that followed my FunGlider around for quite a while… even kites like Multiplex!

Time now for the video:

Please watch the video full screen, it’s so much better with small models flying around. If the video won’t play for you CLICK HERE

A customer was really hassling the girl running the airline check-in desk, yelling and using foul language.

However, the girl was polite, pleasant and smiled while the customer continued to abuse her.

When the man finally left, the next person checking in said to the girl, “Does that happen often? I can’t believe how nice you were to him.”

The girl smiled and said, “No problem, I took care of it. He’s going to New York. His bags are going to Bangkok.”

Colin Cowplain