Great day at the field

[GWRIGHT]

Ever have one of those "near perfect" days at the field? I just had to share it along with a couple findings. I took 10 charged 10-cell packs, 3 charged 6-cell packs, 3 chargers, the E3D and my pondside to the field at roughly 9am. I stayed till around 4pm. Chargers were in use all day,.. totaled 25 flights on the E3D and 5 on the pondside. Got my cells yesterday from tnrtechnical, and two CP1300SCR packs were end to end soldered last night. I wanted to try the CP1300's as a possible pack for funflies, where you only need a few seconds of power per flight. Tests went great. 4 of the flights were with the 1300's. Only get a touch over 3 minutes with them,..but with 1/2 lb less weight on the plane, it will pull vertical out of hover fairly well. Acceleration is much better with 1/2 lb less weight also. Worked at moving CG back,.. got it back almost a full inch from where I was flying it at the neat fair and it flies much better now, but elev. expo had to be increased to 100 to keep it from being too twitchy around neutral. Rough guestimate by balancing on fingers (haven't measured yet) is about 40% chord or so on the CG now. found a new maneuver too,.. was trying to get the knife edge loop within the grasp of my thumbs' abilities and ended up with throttle off in a descending knife edge,.. and saw it would actually keep the fuselage horizontal,.. while descending on knife edge at about a 70 degree angle. Makes a really neat approach to landing . After many months of our pond being filled with some sort of weeds,..the county sprayed it with a chemical and everything sank to the bottom. Real nice now,..so I took the pondside out, as it hasn't been "wet" in many months, just hand launch it occasionally to see it'll still fly. 6 cell radio shack 3000 hydrides, the atom smasher (12 turn car motor), geared with a 9X7.5 APC "E" is currently on it. Only 120 watts full tilt, but it gets out of the water nicely and does splash and goes for a bit over a minute after my 10 minute timer beeps. Early morning,..smooth water,.. about 50 feet to takeoff with this power setup. After about noon,.. with all the wind,.. lots of ripples in the water,.. it jumps off in a few feet. Really strange how it takes so much power to get on step,.. but once on step it'll get off at 3/4 throttle. Had a blast splash after splash. Did manage to turn it into a submarine once,.. flipped inverted with the motor underwater. The motor would still run,.. like a boat with a huge prop,.. so I "taxied" back to shore inverted. That raised some eyebrows with the glow guys that do water flying. Oh well,.. just had to share a good day with everyone.