F1D Team Selection tournament
 

There are many similarities in this competition. High performance, low weight airframes. Mylar covered wings in may instances similar to F3P. This has attracted us to this event.

After coming back from Switzerland, we rested for a week then worked hard on our understanding of F1D Joseph and I both learned how to form tubular fuselages. This took signicant trials and errors. We had limited success when we tried it in July. We began focused build on Friday night 29 August through the weekend to just build the fuselage. This was significant.

Some pictures
 

From our learning how to build a tube fuselage around a slightly larger than 1/4 inch brass tubing.

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Joseph applied his F3P building skills to put together the wings and stab and rudder, then covered them with OS film which is about half the weight as is on the F3P plane mylar film. Not a whole lot lighter, but very fragile to handle. Prop is incredibly difficult to build. We found out the hard way you have to build a "jig" to curve the covering to conform to the prop shape, otherwise if covering conventionally (with the film hanging flat) the prop loses its curve pretty fast. We stayed up all night Friday night, the 4th of September and got a 5 second test flight in the living room. It stayed aloft in the most incredible fashion!!! Not enough room to do any other test flights. We just wanted to make sure the tube did not break under the load of the rubber band. We had ordered some .004 boron earlier in the week and it came in Friday afternoon. Needless to say, to be safe we put about 6 of these boron rods all around the tube to make sure it did not kink or buckle (thus destroying a fuselage as what happened in the last one which was built in July). This boron is potentially deadly. We were told from Ray, the gentleman we ordered it from, that if you take a quarter inch length of boron rod and put it between your finger and thumb and press together, the boron rod dissapears- right into your flesh. A trip to the hospital is then required to surgically remove it. If you use tape (place the rod on top of the tape) and then break it, the small segments are stuck to it and safely out of the way of getting into a hand (or foot). WE got to Lakehurst at 10:30 that morning and Joseph re- assembled the plane. No sleep!
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It was a very intense contest. There were three rounds a day, for three days. Best two flights out of the 9 counted. Its kind of like pattern from the perspective of flight rounds, but intense in that you are constantly working on the plane and testing it. You see many of the competitors going days without anything more than a nibble snack or eating an apple. Adjustments include slicing the rubber to the right thickness to get the best flight time. THis involves careful measurement of a "quarter motor" (rubber band at 1/4 the full length) or "half motor" (1/2 the size, or .2 grams, rather than the maximum of .4 gram rubber band). Joseph's plane weighted in at about 1.9 grams, a full half gram over the "minimum" limit. Imaging flying an 18 Kg pattern plane! Not very competitive weight. Still, we are learning this new and intensely competitive aspect of aeromodeling.

Pictures show processing station- a balance scale and strings to measure the model to assure its within wingspan, tailspan, and wing chord limits.

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Here are some pictures of the flying site and competition.
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We wanted to say "THANK YOU" to Joshua and Hope Finn for helping us this past weekend. We would not have made it through without Josh's help, coaching and tons of advice with setting up and trimming one of these planes. We watched endlessly as Josh adjusted his plane to get it to fly right on the edge of stability, but with the most lift efficiency. We learned much from watching him work on his planes. We also want to give a special shout out to Brett Sanborn, who was kind enough to allow Joseph to fly with him when Joseph was preparing for the F3P world championships last winter and Spring.

Here is a Flite Test video on F1D featuring Josh and his wife.

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Very interesting video on F1D through Flite Test featuring Josh and his wife.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y22mV2smkA

Joseph and the current F1D Junior World Champion, Evan Guyett.

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Joseph and the current F1D world champion (open age), Kang Lee discussing some of the finer points of Joseph's F3P plane.

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Joseph broke the 11 minute mark !!! We were so excited at this achievement. Much work to do. The winners this weekend were averaging over 30 minute flights with a rubber band the size of that which holds a small mailer together (i.e., less than a half gram)

http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/atta...mentid=2119088

Some pictures of the U.S. Team member's equipment. Rubber stripper used to carefully slice the motors to the tight tolarances for ultimate performance. Very complicated variable pitch prop mechanism on Kang's aircraft.

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2016 Junior F1D Team heading to Romania next Spring!

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