Alright here is the story. I am wicked into nitro rc cars and my buddy is wicked into rc planes. So I came up with the idea to put a set of wings on my nitro 1/10th scale truck.

First off I DONT expect this thing to really "fly” I just want it to glide to safety. Okay here is my plan. He (my buddy) has a lot of parts of an avastar trainer plane. We have lots of fabrication abilities as well. We where thinking that if we took the main wing, what ever you guys call that and put above the center of gravity on the car. Then we take a rear half of a plane and stick it off the back of the car.

To make the car "take off" I will drive my car full speed (50 mph no lies) off a jump. This will propel the car about 10 ft in the air. Not all that impressive. To add to that we will have the lunch off the top of a hill. So it has to land at the bottom of the hill.

My buddy will steer the plane once it is airborne and hopefully land it after about a 30 ft decent. There is no doubt in my mind that his abilities to fly will be an issue. He could fly book shelf if it had wings.

There is one problem (so far) my buddy isn’t convinced that it will simply glide and neither am I. The car is just over 2 lbs. He thinks it will drop like a rock once the tires leave the ground due to no propulsion. So he wants to put a second engine of some sort. I was thinking of a electric engine with a propeller on it mounted to the top of the plant. And have it mounted pointing to the rear of the vehicle to so it will push the car along once airborne.

how fast does a typical electric plane motor rev with no gear reduction. Will a motor from a car work okay?

ANY feedback on this subject is appreciated good or bad.

you will need a gas plane engine i think

I can't help much with this but please take a lot of video

my buddy had mentioned the gas engine obtion. I just tho that the whole extra engine to get running was a little over whelming. I dont know the frist thing about planes. But my buddy knows all about them.

If a gas engine has to be put on that then that will be what gets put on. I would rather attempt to keep it as simple as possible. but I know that wont happen.

I give you an A+ for creativity... Check out this website for some ??serious?? info....
http://www.aerocar.com/

Must be cabin fever, gets mighty boring up there with so much snow.

Way too much time on your hands?

Cool!! Gas is simpler that electric, but a cheapie electric motor with no speed control and enough power, will run around $50. I think you will simply dive to one side and crash without ailerons and elevator. If you do install flight controls and get your math right, it could actually fly, depending on the CG and trim.

It might be easier to mount an entire plane to the chassis of a small rc car, replacing the bottom of the fuse with the bottom of the chassis and removing as much weight as possible. If you can get it to balance near the cg of the original plane, it may fly for a while. You will need 2 Rx's and two Tx's for this stunt, but you could run both Rx's on a single pack.

TAKE VIDEO!!! at least 2 cameras!!

I love it when a plan comes together!!!

lots of good idears here. Our plan was that my buddy would take his transmiter and fly it and have his seprate reciever on the car. and I would have my transmiter and my reciever on the car. but we would use the same battery to save weight. These two hobbies are difinetly not ment to be mixed. in the car world heavyer parts is stronger and in my opinion better. in the plane wolrd it seems that everything needs to be light and duribiltiy is not a factor.

Also between the two of us we have a electric motor and speed controler. and plenty of servos. There is no doubt that there will be flight controls and ground controls.

it is currious to me if my buddy forced some doun pressure on the car how ever he would do that and I accelerated to top mph. and then the applied lift. how long would the car drift up into the air before it would lose momentum and touch back doun again. I guess it is hard to predict with so many variables.

Oh and as for time on my hands. Ya I got a quite a bit of that seenins how my buddy acutally was my employer untill he ran out of work for me. so it leaves me with no cash but LOTS of time on my hands.

my buddy also thinks that we should strap a modle rocket engine to the back of it. I told him that nitro fumes and ignited rocket probly wouldent be a verry good mix. Although it would be fairly easy to configure.

while it's an interesting concept, there is absolutely nothing that makes it attractive. it's not going to be great plane and it's not a good car. it doesn't share any components. the only thing is maybe sharing the chassis/fuse.

if you really want to see this thing fly. take an avistar, add one pound of weight. fly it. if it flies fine, add another pound. if it still flies (it should since you'll only have about warbird wingloading then anyway) then take the avistar and strap it on the the car and drive it off the cliff. should work like a charm.

if you want to be sophisticated, then try to leverage components. for example, if you're running shaft driven car, try to add a pully to pull a prop rather than using an additional powerplant. better yet, instead of driving all four wheels, lift the front gear box higher and run a prop. if you're using a belt driving car, consider disengaging the front drive and routing that to a prop on top of the wing.

otherwise, string up a whole bunch of zip ties and just lash that car on the belly of the avistar... of course, watch out for the CG. i don't think it will be that hard.

what about putting a parachute on the car and dropping from 1000ft?

oh yeah.. and whatever you do, video please!!!

don't know what your plane looks like but i got this...

The video is a Must! I like Forestrokes ideas on linking the cars powerplant to a prop. That would show some real creativity and novelty. Assuming that you can get the CoG right, I think you'll have problems getting to the ramp at top speed. 50MPH on an AviStar wing should develope a LOT of lift

A nitro 1/10 touring car weighs in at about 1.7 kgs, about 3.8 pounds. There is no way you can find a nitro car of 2 pounds! Even a NTC3 is over 1.5 kgs.

You will need a wing of about easily 52"-58" (bigger wing makes it easier to glide and you need not have so much power) with a chord of about 8"-10" to make this flyable. This is all just to keep it potentiall afloat. Now let's talk about powering the plane. The plane will need a nice big outrunner to turn a prop of about 16x8 at a minimum. Something like an AXI 4130 is a minimum. Now we will need batteries, say something like a pack of 5S2P. The electric motor and batteries will take your whole car-plane to about easily 8 pounds.

Do you think its worth it? Why not just go to buy a flying lawn mower?

tIANci - i was also wondering about the 2 lb car. but then again, the guy is from NH not from Hampshire so it is unlikely that he is using metric. And maybe he has a plastic truck rather than a hopped up metal offroader. still 2 lbs does sound awefully light.

the rest of your post about axi outrunners and 5S2P packs was just mean :-) hahaha... 16 x 8 prop... i can totally imagine that wry smile across your face when you were typing that post in!

anyway, the avistar has a 59" and a chord of just over 10" so it fits your requirements :-) with a wing are of 600+sq.in. and a tIANci-estimated weight of 8 lbs, you get a wing loading of around 30oz/sqft. which is like a heavy warbird.

mittimj - the best way to find out is to strap whatever the weight of your car is to the avistar first to see if it'll fly at all. and do it incrementally. if your beast weighs in at 2 lbs, try one then two. if it weighs in at 4 lbs, try one, two, etc. this is the only safe way to find out. oh yeah... with 4 lbs strapped to your avistar, you'd better have beefed up the wing and the landing gear. and fly very gently.

Video... There must be Video...

And drive it off a 1000m drop... This way you can do more tricks on the way down...

But in all seriousness... Even though it is a pointless even stupid idea it's really cool when someone does something so Whacked...

And who knows you may even work something out which improves an Airplane or a Car when they are being used for their normal purpose...

Don't make the Car too much of a Airplane though or it becomes even more pointless... Try to keep all of the cars normal functions while still being able to fly...

Good luck

Matt

Does your car insurance or Airplane insurance cover this one...

Well... no matter what, proof of concept first... unless, of course, the point is to drive it off a cliff and enjoy its crashing to the ground. in that case, please play some heavy metal in the background.

I would strap on a huge motor to the Car/Plane thing. R/C cars are heave and unbalanced. You will have a hard time determining the center balace point of the car. You will need a good size wing so this bad boy will at least fly and the wings will have to be strong. A plane weighs 5-6lbs and i think my R/C weighs almost 10lbs. Once in the air it will be like trying to fly a Car(sorry i had to) it will be combersome and unresponsive. Landing sould not be that hard if you can get it on any of the wheels just floor the car and turn the prop off. I hope you can get this thing to Fly not just glide.

Also Video is a must.

I might not have a lot of exsperance in R/C airplanes but this is comon physics and arodynamics so it is not that hard to figure out.

Yes... and Bumble Bees fly when mathmatics say they shouldn't... So Just give it ago...

I'd say this would be a new post for the "crash" forum....take lots of pics and video!!!!


Dave...

Crash this thing could be cool Run it though a ring of fire and then have a small fire balll shoot out of the ground when it hits the ground. THis could be cool as hell.

I like the idea of just taking my car and sraping it to the bottom of a avastar. but the problem is I dont have a complete plane. I have LOTS of pices to the plane some of the parts I have 2 of.

oh I saw how heavy the car was today on a acurate scale and it is just shy of 5lbs. The bathroom scale is off by a cupple of pounds I guess.

I also like the idea of runing the front driveshaft off a 4wd car to a propeller. the problem with this is the drive shafts are geared doun a lot the way the engine is hooked to it. and the cars wimpy .15 engine simply cant handle spinning a prop.

I am going to persue the idear of taking a whole plane that flys and straping the car to it. Also I sort of picked a bad time to poast this forum becasue I am leaving for vacation tomarow.

I would go for some James Bond soundtrack!

Boy, it sure is great how supportive people can be when someone has a different idea. Personally, I don't see why the design goal here can't be met. It seems you're pretty intent on making this happen, and have a capable pilot to participate. The requirements in the first post were to accelerate on the ground, launch off a ramp, and glide down a hill to a safe landing. I saw no mention of climbing to altitude under power and maintaining powered flight, at least in the initial posts--correct me if I'm wrong. The sketch in post #1 is very short coupled and would be twitchy, but other than that I see nothing to preclude success here. If you can keep the total weight at about 7.5 lbs, it would have a wing loading around 28oz/sf, whereas the avistar wing loading is about 20oz/sf, so it will need to glide FAST and will have a high sink rate, but it should be do-able.

well I just got off the phone with my buddy. the conversation was brief because he is at work. we concluded that we are going to first "glide" it off a hill. then we are going to learn lots for that and go from there. He was against the adear of taking a plane and straping a car to the bottom of it becuse then he would have to buy a plane.

Here are some pics of what I am glueing up now........ there is also one of the jump I slaped together. and a pic of the car that is going to be used. I am probly going to shed some weight off the car before it flys.

at 5 lbs you're not going to be able to get much of a glide. the plane sans engine will be 4 lbs... that's a wing loading of 34 oz/sqft which means you'll pretty much have a glide ratio of a cow. plus with 9 lbs on the wings, they will likely collapse under the weight (or rather over it).

and so much for propulsion, that car doesn't have 4-wheel drive and the engine is transversely mounted. will be near impossible to get that to a prop without significant cost and additional weight.

and... saw the avistar fuselage (remains) but didn't see the wing.

from the looks of it, it will be a very difficult project due to the center of gravity of the car being just forward the engine. don't know how you would be able to get all the wings etc mounted. you'd essentially have to build a new frame above the car and hope the engine doesn't burn through it.

the better solution would be to make this a canard meaning that the main wing is in the back rather than in the front and the elevator is in the front. this way the CG needs to be 1/3 the distance from main wing to the stab which means that the car fits right in.