nekked_man_2000

When the Beetween came out many years ago, I built one from the magazin plan. I let a litt boy fly it, he crashed it, but it mainly destroyed the body. So, I rebuilt the body using the wing and tail I already had. I made the nose longer because with the Black Widow I was running on it I had to add lead to the nose; also I wanted to be able to use My Tee Dee with a fuel tank. So the nose is an inch longer and I deleted the cockpit, I used to have a bubble canopy on it. Fast forward about 10 years and I would take my 3 year old to the flying field... so this be came "his plane", not motor and an old toy car radio, he'd set it on the flight line and show it off to people and throw it around and pretend he was flying it with the radio. Fast forward another 3 years, and I was about to trash it, many broken ribs and just lots of hager rash and the covering was peeling, wood was oil soaked...but he wanted it. Soooo, I stuck, somehow, some old useless econocote on it. I was going to stick a "product" cox engine on it...but I decided the covering wouldn't last 5 flights with that thing drooling on it... so into the scrap heap and I found a geared e-flite 380 from an old Electrajet, and I bought a 7 cell NiMh pack for $8.00. Stuffed it all inside and today got the first official test flight. It weighs about 18oz. and flys very good. I remembered it flew good with the cox, but I was afraid it would be too heavy and underpowered with this set up...but I think it will make a good plane for hime, he flew it around while I took the pictures.

It flew good enough that I think I'm going to build 2 more, one for me and one for my dad. I have a Parkzone decathalon that I will take the guts out of for it, I think it flys better than the decathalon, I may do ailerons on mine.

I have flight pictures and even a little video, but with only a 3 times zoom on the pocket cam I took it just looks like a speck. Next time I get to go fly I'll take the camera with some zoom on it.

cheers

Austin

nekked_man_2000

okay, he was watching the video and wanted me to upload it to Youtube. It took me a while to figure it out, if it worked this should be the link, just a speck, but you can hear me coaching him a little as I'm trying to film, he's doing pretty good at keeping one out of trouble these days.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spDnfA1tsNg

Austin

DeviousDave

The BeeTween was my first airplane. I built it from MAN plans, scaled up for an OS .10.

I almost made it thru the first flight, panicked and turned a loop into a figure 0-9.

soarhead-RCU

Yep it wasis a great design. I built 2 with the pull out plans right after they came out. Flew them both with Cox Black Widows. One of my sons flew into a metal grainery at a local farm we used to fly at years ago and completely re-kitted it. At full speed it completely exploded into small pieces. The second one we flew untill it was so fuel soaked that glue wouldnt hold as it was almost like mush. So I saved the wing for many years and a few years ago I made a foam fuse and tail feathers in sorta the same style as the original except a longer nose for balance. I use a cheap GWS 350 geared motor, lipo's and micro gear and it now is 15 ounces ready to fly, and boy does it fly great. Great park size flier and floats along or is plenty speedy for a small field. Randy made a great airfoil for this plane!!!!!!!

Your boy is doing a great job with his.........

Happy Flying
Bob

nekked_man_2000

I was just going with what I had, gettin' kind of hard to find NiCd and Nimh battery packs in the right size anymore, and they cost about the same as lipo. I'm thinking I will upgrade to a cheap Brushless set up when this battery is toast...this is a good setup with the way it is...but if I upgrade to Lipo I'd have to buy the right type of speed control...for not a whole lot more money I can get one of the cheap out runners like the "super tigre" 400 from tower or something similar. I have several 3cell Lipo packs, but I'm afraid they'd burn up the little 380, and I don't want to have to buy 2cells for just this plane. I'd come out cheaper using the batteries I already own and buying a cheapie motor. I'm going to try one of the cheapie Tyco batteries I have from Wal-Mart, but when I tried one before I didn't have much luck in planes...they aren't capable of pulling the amps. I'm not a big electric guy and I don't want to spend much money in that direction. Just in this case there were several reasons for electric...one of the main reasons being the ablility to go within a mile of my house to get in some evening stick time for him.

The next one I build will have 2 spars, the spar in this one is weaker on one side and allows one wing to flex more than the other...and flex they do! So when I pulled some loops it pulled hard to one side in heavy g's. on this plane I used a dowel rod from Wal-Mart for the leading edge. At the time I built it I was stationed in Biloxi Ms and the closest hobby shop was about 90 miles, I think I used elmers white glue, and scraps of covering from my Eagle II I built and learned to fly on. there are also no fuselage doublers because I didn't have enough balsa wood, and the trailing edge is just a strip of 1/8" balsa because I didn't have TE stock...didn't even know what that meant at the time. You probably noticed the fancy dowel and popsicle stick motor mount. :-)


Austin