It's been said that necessity is the mother of all invention. I recently found it necessary to build an impromptu way to test one of my motors that a fellow RCG member was interested in buying. A quick dig through my various scrounge boxes produced what I think will be a very handy apparatus for my future endeavors in this hobby.

There are many open fields where I live, and the closest ones are only suitable for belly landers, so I ordered me up one of those Bixlers from Hobby King. Thinking I bought the Bixler 2, imagine my surprise when I opened the box to find a Bixler V1.1 inside. After rechecking my order online, sure enough, that's just what I purchased. At first I was bummed and tempted to send it back; however, after reading a few threads on the model, I think the Bixler V1.1 is the perfect plane for my needs. I will be building it over the next few days or so and will try to post some pix.

EDIT: I posted some pix - decided to attach them to this post to to go with the text. Enjoy :-)...Continue Reading

Just having coffee this morning and perusing my new Micro-Mark catalog. For any serious modeler, this catalog is a treasure trove of professional tools and gadgets for a very broad scope of modeling tasks. It's as much fun as looking at an old Sears Catalog and will provide many good ideas and solutions for your projects. I highly recommend it. To get your copy, go to www.micromark.com and look for the "Request a Catalog" link in the upper right corner of the their home page. Oh yes, the website is pretty cool too

I've seen these two books mentioned on various forums, so I did a little Googling, and although they seem to be out of print, I managed to find a couple copies of Harry Higley's There Are No Secrets and Master Modeling through Amazon. So far, they seem filled with cool techniques, so I hope they'll be as useful to me as they've been to others.

*UPDATE* I had thought the Harry Higley books were out of print. Actually, Sullivan Products (one of my fav's) has acquired all of the assets of Harry Higley and Sons. They have a suitable inventory of all the Harry Higley books, tools, and modeling accesories. Here's a link to the site with the information: www.harryhigley.com

My son has a Great Planes YAK-55 3D Foamie. There's an old thread about the plane here: https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=345428

The brushed motor and stick came loose the other day and the gear box threw a tooth and became insanely noisy, so I decided it was time to mod it to brushless. The plane weighs in at just about 1.0 lb with power system and 1300 mAh 3S, so after some pondering and comparing motor weights, I decided on a HobbyKing Park450 890kv. I bought a 10mm aluminum stick mount from Smallpartscnc on eBay.

The motor and prop including the aluminum mount came in about 6 grams less than the stock motor, gear box and mount assembly. The stick mount fit the stick perfectly and I just trimmed the stick so that the prop was in its original position with the new motor installed.

I had to switch out the brushed ESC with a brushed ESC. I had a Turnigy Red Brick 30A ESC from another project.

I used the original 10x4.7 prop; however, I had to ream out the hub so that it would fit on the furnished prop adapter.

The proof was in the pudding. The airplane will now hover and it has very good overall vertical performance. It sounds so much better in the air! The motor is very quiet and you can hear the air flow around the model. This was a worthwhile mod in my opinion and the Turnigy Park450 with the SmallPartsCNC stick mount, and Red Brick 30A ESC is a perfectly easy swap out brushless power system to make this classic foamie even more fun to fly.

12 June 2012

This will be my first attempt at a build blog. I recently purchased the HobbyKing version of the BD-5B. Here's a link to the product page...
https://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/s...dProduct=17137

From what I am finding out, this kit is a knock off copy of the Aero-Works BD-5, and it is the evolution (I think) of a kit once available from Cermark. There are several reviews and build logs of those kits elsewhere in the forums as follows:

• "HobbyKing BD-5 build / first report" by rafe_b at https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/show....php?t=1521315
• Discussion, "Cermark BD-5" started by lovo in 2006 at https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=468757
• Comparison of Aero-Works and HobbyKing BD-5 kits on WattFlyer at http://www.wattflyer.com/forums/showthread.php?t=65519
• RCUniverse Review: "AeroWorks BD-5B" at http://www.rcuniverse.com/magazine/a...article_id=925

I received my kit last week and it is beautiful right out of the box. So far, I have assembled the wings, and I have installed the wing servo. One thing I discovered assembling the wings was that the dihedral block was a tad too long. I test fit it in both wings; however, I forgot to make sure the wings would butt together with it installed before I mixed the epoxy. Good thing I used 15-minute epoxy as I was able to quickly unmate the wings, trim about a 1/16" off of the dihedral block, and quickly reassemble the wing. The wing servo took a little bit of Dremel...Continue Reading