Well G20 has come and gone, we have had a heat wave so that kept most of rent a crowd away. A few minor things but all in all very tame. We had our F/A-18 Classic and Super Hornets buzzing around all the week and weekend, hard to spot at 25k feet in low viz grey scheme.
Was tracking our tankers and AWACS on flight radar 24, pretty cool. No transponder signals for the bugs so could not track them.
Still waiting on the chomate yellow to arrive. Far too hot in the shed to do much and have been away on a work trip all of last week except Friday.
test flew and crashed the vampire on Sunday.
First flight was ok. Took off fine but ailerons very sensitive. One roll at a zillion degrees a sec roll rate, wekll it seemed like that. It was very fast on the couple of times I gave it full noise. Mostly abouit 2/3 to 1/2 throttle. any less and it started to wallow about and was not happy.
Reasonable though fast landing with 1/2 flaps.
Lipo and ESC warm but not hot so considering we had 38C at 8am I thought was pretty good.
I reduced aileron throws from 85% to 65% and increased expo to 45%.
Coffee and a chat then time for 2nd flight.
Take off went ok, gear up and climb out nice. Ailerons better but still sensitive and easy to over bank. Ok full noise, man this thing is QUICK!!
Couple of low passes, a roll and a loop then thought one more low pass then into circuit for landing.
Turned into the strip and applied full noise excpet there was no noise - opps! Low and running out of options I elected to try and belly land. I was far too fast, the speed was deceptive. Anyway it banged in instead of skidding in and bounced up to about 6 foot while doing a slow roll to the right then catwheeled down the strip and resultant carnage.
FARK! Passed the Tx over head down and hear a voice "it's on fire!" Opps there is thick grey smoke and a bight green to orange flame in the belly. Spint over and pulled the lipo out which came loose as the ESC was burnt out.
Not sure if the ESC went over current or over temp. Combo of both most likely. Anyway it certainly burnt itself out bigtime and cost me a model.
So now what to do? I do have another of these Vampires in the box ready to build and I have lots of spare bits pulled out of the wreck.
Needs a beefed up ESC though. I'm thinking flying at ful;l to 3/4 throttle was more then the ESC could handle on such a hot day. Yes I did have slots in the belly to alow cooling air to get over the ESC.
Anyway.
