Want2Soar

Has anyone out there ever experimented with or known
of anyone who has experimented with putting
an electric powered pod on a 2 meter sailplane?

Your responses will be greatly appreciated.

BMatthews

I haven't done it myself but a few years back there was one that used an enlarged pylon to hold the battery pack and used a direct drive motor. No reason why you couldn't make up something like that yourself. Or the usual thin pylon with the battery cells rigged up in a top surface conformal pack that laid smoothly along the wing.

The big problem is that you're pretty much limited to a smaller prop in this day when we pretty much all agree that a larger folder is more efficient at climbing.

But if you have a lighter 2 meter design and set up a pylon to let you use a 9 inch prop on a Speed 400 and gearbox I could see that working quite well. Just keep the cell capacity down to smaller sizes. Weight would be a killer for such a combo. It would be a lazy climb in any event but if you just wanted a quick boost to thermal country without laying out launching lines this is a nice way to go.

Or you could just build a second fuselage for your wings and tail like I did.

Proace

I had a gentle lady which started out with a cox .049 on a pylon. I converted to a sp-400, 7x3, 8 cell (300ma). I could get about 50 to 100 ft before batts went but was able to make thermals. I gave to plane to a friend and kept my motor setup. He is going to be using a geared sp-400 on a pylon with a folding prop and his pylon will have a hollow center where he is going to be putting AAA NiHm batteries. I had mine in the fuse.