RE: Contra Rotating Propeller Drive for f3a 2m Pattern Planes
Yes, It's true. I am currently running with zero degrees of right thrust, and as far as I can tell there is no spiraling slipstream of air over the fuselage.
As far as progress is concerned, for us the pattern season ends this weekend with the D4 district championship in Hebron Kentucky. After that I am going to have a lot more time to devote to finishing our version 2 Contra design, and I hope to be able release a drawing / CAD package to Mike by the end of this month. (September ...) After that we will build parts and assemblies, and if the design is sound, we hope to have a small initial batch of drives available early in the new year.
As far as price is concerned, we won't have final pricing until we can properly cost our version 2 design, but initially we are going to have to start with small production runs because we don't have the money to front the cost of materials and CNC machine time for large batches. This means that the initial units will have to be more expensive than later batches where we can spread CNC setup costs over larger numbers of parts. Given this, my expectation is that our first units will be in the $800 to $1200 range, with sets of props running in the $150 to$200 range. However, keep in mind that these numbers are completely subject to change when we get proper costing information.