joelomunro

Gday all, I've been lurking around here for a while but thought it was about time to join in the community properly. I've been flying for about a year now, started with a Vmar Discovery trainer and an OS .46AX and had a Seagull 40 low winger for a bit, which sadly bit the dust a couple of weeks back. While I do like the .40-.46 sized aircraft and bigger, I've got a real liking for 1/2a sized aircraft aswell. I built a 1/2a Stick about 6 months ago from the 1/8a La Stick free plans that I found online, enlarged by about 30%. Initially I flew this with a Cox surestart type engine, which while it flew, wasnt all that inspiring. Unfueled weight is about 360grams and wingspan is 780mm with no dihedral. I upgraded to a stock .049 Medallion with the single bypass cylinder, running an adaptor head and OS A3 plug, which while it was a big improvement on the reedie, still lacked that little something. I'd put a bit of a score in the cylinder wall, and while the engine started easily and still ran alright, I decided to get a replacement dual bypass piston and cylinder and a Merlin plug with adpator. I also changed props once I got the engine up and going, from a Cox 5x4 Black to an APC 5.5X2.5. Its a screamer now an a ball to fly on 25% nitro and 20% castor, tho a bit more difficult to start by hand, to which I've now picked up a Sullivan Hornet starter to scare it into life. I had a week and a half off work recently with a fractured bone in my foot, so got started with another project that had been on my mind for a while. Its a 1m motor glider with a pusher configuration from an Australian Airborne Magazine plan called a Blo Fli. It'll have a fairly standard reedie bottom end with brass drive plate and Black Widow tank and 5 x3.5 three blade pusher prop. I'll keep it as light as possible with 9 gram servos, a small Orange 2.4 receiver and 350mah 2C Lipo and BEC for power. Anyways I'll put up some pics of the Stick and will get some progress pics of the Blo Fli as it comes along.


Cheers



Joel

ChicaWolverina

Very nice! But... no dihedral looks like anhedral, and that makes it truly ugly. You must seal and paint the firewall so that it doesn't look like something from the electric mentality of ARF.

And we want to see inside too!

NEW222

Nice plane. Also like the CFL Roughriders hat too.

joelomunro

Hey again, with the zero dihedral wing this thing flies like its on a rail, barrel rolls and loops like a gem. I built it with no dihedral also because I wanted a bit of a step up from something inherently stable to push my flying ability a bit. Couple of pics of the inside, theres not a lot going on in there, two 9g HK servos, Spektrum AR500 receiver, 1oz Sullivan tank set up on about a 25 deg slant with no clunk and a 400mah receiver pack velcro'd to the inner side of the tank compartment. Balances dead on the wing spar. The firewall has had several coats of dope and a coat of thinned expoy and its held up well to 6 months of reasonably regular usage and a couple of decent crashes. A mate built a mini stick before me, which was the inspiration for this one, which was built very lightly and has since met a bit of a demise, where as this one is nigh on indestructible. As for the Roughriders hat, its a bit of a hangover from living in Sask and working on a large grainfarm for a couple of year, miss that place...


Joel

ffkiwi

Pleased to hear it flies well-you could probably have thinned down the fuselage by about 30% or more-this is a good example of why scaling designs up or down by a simple % doesn't always give the best result-either structurally or volumetrically-and why it is often preferable to scale each component separately-bear in mind that there's often a history behind the original design-the 1/8A Stick (a great little design) derived from the Ace R/C 'Littlest Stick'-and that was designed back in the 1970s for the Ace pulse commander gear-which at the time (I had a set) was the smallest and lightest gear commercially available-but by modern standards was akin to a housebrick! The Littlest Stick fuselage was designed to take the Pulse commander Rx plus the magnetic actuator (the original was rudder only pulse proportional) so was sized to take those components-plus a 2.4V 100 mAh nicad (ie 2-cells) which wasn't really a problem from a size and weight perspective-the 1/8A Stick simply updated the design for more modern gear and 2 or 3 channels without really altering the proportions.
.....so a simple 30% blow up of the 1/8A Stick gives you a fuselage that is much larger than it needs to be-and of course that adds drag. Its always a compromise between the smallest space you can get the gear into, vs accessibility to servos, pushrods etc for any replacements or adjustments that may be required later on...........I find that my big hands are the biggest limitation to R/C compartment accessibility-despite all the various clever tools and fixtures that are on the market to help you ...

ChrisM
'ffkiwi'

PS I commend your choice of the Sullivan Hornet mini starter-these are very useful little units and can handle all the 1/2A stuff plus up to .15 size comfortably-[though would probably struggle with a high compression racing glow .15]-and unlike the other 1/2A starters that have come and gone they're still available and moderately priced. [That being said-my personal preference is the Miller R/C one-but only because it handles (with the appropriate insert) the smaller 010 and 020s as well as the 049s and still has enough power for an 09 glow]

joelomunro

Gday Chris, valid point about the dimensions of the fuse mate, however as it was my first 1/2a build I stuck to the plan I had as I figured atleast it'd be a flier. Next small build after the Blo Fli isprobably going to be a Little Toni with either a Tee Dee .049 or an AME .061, and yeah I know those two are chalk and cheese in performance. Im figuring maidening it on something slower and then when I'm comfortable with it, upping the powerplant. The Little Toni is a sweet looking little thing and should definitely be fast, I'm pushing my boundaries a bit as I want to advance my flying ability.



Joel

ffkiwi

I have a good mate-Dave Hipperson (no not the Australian one!) who was a top FFer in his day (he's since dropped out of modelling in favour of photography!) who designed a rather nice -and very competitive FF duration model called the T-34 (after the Russian tank-simple, effective, cheap to build, reliable etc etc)- three sizes have been published over the years-the original for .19-.21, a 1/2A one and a 1.5cc diesel version. They look the same-but all are different-they are not the same design scaled up or down- but have subtle differences in moment arms, wing or tailplane aspect ratios etc-because he had enough experience to know that a simple scale up or down would not deliver the performance and reliability he wanted in that particular size (I'm sure wing loading and flying speed would also have been factors influencing his design considerations)-yet if you look at them you would say 'oh thats a 75% or 60% T-34'. Its not just R/C models you have to watch for pitfalls in scaling..........

Going the other way-are you familiar with the 'Simplex' vintage design?-the original was designed by Paul Plecan in 1941 and intended to be very cheap to build and fly. It was 60" span. [still popular for vintage R/C in NZ today] 'Aeromodeller' published a 2/3 scaled down version in the mid 1980s which proved VERY popular for vintage FF in several countries-especially NZ and the UK. [I know you have a different vintage cutoff date in Australia] A few people here though it would be a good candidate for the vintage 020 replica class-which has a 36" wingspan limit (so you'd only need to shrink the 40" one to 90%)-not much.......BUT when you fit an 020 to a 36" Simplex, (on its normal 4-1/2" prop) you end up with about 1/4" of the prop tip extending outside the nose-and that won't fly much! So direct scaling down can trap you just as much as scaling up..... [as it was those 36" models flew quite well on a DC Dart .5cc-producing about the same power as a TD 020 at half the revs-but happily turning a 7" prop!] Somewhere in Aeromodeller in the late 80s or early 90s is a shot of another mate of mine, Hec Sapwell flying one of those 36" slightly scaled down Simplexes at one of the Old Warden vintage days

This is of course a situation (vintage) where the rules allow you to scale up or down to your heart's content-but you can't alter model proportions or structure in the process.

ChrisM
'ffkiwi'

combatpigg

My Feedback: (3)

Very nice..but truly ugly......hmmmm.
No dihedral on a high wing sport plane looks bad azz to me ...having dihedral looks like "training wheels" on a high wing sport plane. It also interferes with the model's aerobatic abilities.

Toysareforkids

My Feedback: (4)

I agree!
Allmy stiks have flat wings! And are electric! I sold myonly nitro one,it had dihedral!

Mine are electric, because I fly them in my backyard. Eletric don't bothermy elder neighbors, I flt over their backyards also.

Pat

bjr_93tz

The only high wing, no dihedral, stick thing I've built has strong roll coupling when you use rudder.

If I were to build it again I'd put anhedral in the wings (bent down) to try and reduce the roll coupling. I've got a low winger with dihedral and it's more than stable enough upside down when it's effectively a high wing with anhedral.... just my 2c

Toysareforkids

My Feedback: (4)

I use no coupling with any of mine, and they fly great.

Pat

joelomunro

Mine doesnt fly with any coupled controls either and flies really well too, its pretty much the first plane I pick up when heading out for a fly, easy to fit in the car, minimal flight gear to go with it and bags of performance and fun.

Joel

Mr Cox

The coupling shows up very well during knife edge flying (on all my Stick like planes), and it would be even worse if the wing had dihedral...