I've come back to micro building after about a year doing other things and have noticed a shift in the focus of most threads here. When I last checked here there was an abundance of threads detailing simple and cheap balsa, tissue, cling wrap and foam airframes, with bitcar radios, N20s, 6mm pagers and the like. Now most posts seem to be about people doing interesting things with aeroace clones and very highly detailed, fanatically lightweight models. Of course this is not a bad thing, but I'm wondering if people are still doing this old fashioned stuff as well?

What is everyone up to?

Hey

Nice plane. Details please.
I was just thinking of making a big living room flyer.
I have went as small as I can go with current equipment and thinking how easy it would be to go back and build a room flyer with 6mm motor.

Billy

Balsa fuselage, wing and tail structure with thin shopping bag covering.

1mm carbon wing pylons and landing gear

650mm wingspan, 200mm chord, 500mm long overall

Bitcar radio with mosfet modification, 140mah lipo, N20 direct driving a U80 prop

Weighs 19g, too heavy for lrf for me.

This is really just one of my many variations on a theme inspired by Greg's flamingo, nothing too exciting. I've been having fun flying it in the updraft from my chimney.

Leon.

Dave Robelen just posted this plane over in the smallrc forums.
http://www.smallrc.com/forum/showthread.php?t=426

I've got a cheap 10" foam plate/bamboo stick bitglider that I winch up to about 60-80' using a radio shack motor and thread. Just did the 9v mod and will try to double the height and hopefully the 40-45 second glide times. I'm using 1-2 2016 lithium coin cells on the rx which work great with my bird actuator. My free flight models take a lot of adjustments to launch straight but with rudder control, they go straight up right away!

Also tested out a bit rx on 2 2016 cells on a 2.25" muscle wire rudder actuator which wiggled back and forth very well. (mw breaks a lot with handling though) (Was trying to make propo rudder before AeroAces came
out).


I think we have to post bitmodels in the parkflyer/foamies forum now.

Bill

Looks like I'm trying the same stuff as you Aerohydro. This is my latest LR. I call it a LR because to be a LRF it would have to fly sucessfully. At the time I didnt have any light balsa an it ended up weighing 14.9 grams. With 60 inches I fear it won't fly slow enough.
I've got some better balsa now and plenty of CF rods so I'm thinking of entering the LRF cookup. Ought to be fun and informative.

Those are shurely not out of time - if consquently light, they are so slow that you can follow them with the Tx . And there should be no damage on them if going down. But for both planes shown here, the tail areas look (imho) a bit short. That could make them tipstallers or spiralers

Bye

DRETWR, Nice model, though I agree you would probably need a fairly large LR at that weight. Mine is a different animal however. I get reasonably slow flight with plenty of power and wing incidence. Flys comfortably in an area about 7 x 10 metres. A large rudder with lots of throw makes control very responsive.

relaxr, tail moment is indeed short but area is reasonable. I have never had a problem with tip stalling. This may be due to the way my wing is rigged: threads tie the front spar to the fuselage, but the rear spar is unsupported. This allows the trailing edge to lift at the wing tips, reducing angle of attack.

It's really amazing the sort of poor construction, shoddy repair and abuse these planes can take and continue to fly. I once had the complete outer wing section removed by a tree, yet the model was still controllable, did pull to one side a tad.

Yeppers people still build planes using Bit Rx/Tx's! In fact i build them all the time. Glad to see people are still building variants of my Flamingo.


Greg

Aerohydro, after I posted I started converting metric to inches, oops.
Mine is 4 grams lighter.
Yours is OVER THREE TIMES LARGER, WOW!
Different animals, most certainly different breeds.
Back to the board.
Ted