Hi all,
My local field is closing and I am thinking about a Wattage Tangent for my winter practice plane. I know nothing about electrics so any advice on setup would be helpful. Most importantly how much room would I nee to fly this size (43") aircraft

TIA

If your plane has 43 inch wingspan and is a pattern plane then more than likely it will almost require as much area as a glow engine plane of the same size. A normal flying field would be large enough. Electrics take more room than you might think unless you go to a small electric. Alot of the Quote Ball Park Flyers just shouldn't be flow in a baseball field, if they are then they take up every inch of space available.

If you intend to fly an electric roughly the same size and speed as your regular pattern plane then you need to plan on having as much room as you usually do.

For the power you might want to talk to the folks at Aero-Model.com about their Hacker B50 series. Whatever brand you decide on you should look at a sensorless brushless system to give you the power you expect for pattern work.

the Tangent is a little speed300/speed400 size plane (31 inch span, 183 squares), so a Hacker B20 (about 2 ounces) would be the appropriate motor, not a B50 (about 7 or 8 ounces). the same setup aero-model uses in the mini-laser 3D would do nicely. The tangent specs state 15 to 17 ounces. Their mini-laser 3D is 24 ounces and hovers and goes vertically, plus has a fair amount of speed. Same system but propped with a 9X6 versus the 10X4.7 should be a great combo for the tangent. Would be quite overpowered that way, but you could always drop the prop size to exchange a bit of thrust for speed and increase the runtime.

Oops, guess I missed the mention of which plane he was using. No doubt the B50 system would be way too much for that :-)

Then again you missed the opportunity to mention that perhaps your own Kwik-E might be a nice practice plane for pattern if rudder is added. You're just too modest :-) For that matter an E3D would give good practice time and it certainly slows down for smaller fields.

yes, the kwik-E would work well, as long as no sustained knife-edge is involved (point rolls yes, but not sustained knife edge), but I didn't think it was appropriate to use this forumn for advertising Greg,.. just trying to be "politically correct" .

"politically correct" hmmmmmm, can't say I've done that a lot :-)

Thanks for the info so far.
Double checked the Tangent is only 31". Anyone have this plane?
It comes with a 370 motor and gear box but don't have any idea what kind of performance to expect. Trying to get this together on the cheap so I would intead to use the supplied motor.
The Kwick E sure is nice looking but not much smaller than the 51" glo practice plane I have now.

Any other ideas?

Anthony,

I don't have the tangent but I do have the Wattage Sukhoi which is around the same wingspan and uses the same 370 geared motor as the Tangent.

I fly my Sukhoi is an area about the size of a soccer field without much problem.

If the Tangent is the same size using the same power system it should'nt be much faster than my Sukhoi if any.

I fly using the Wattage 8/800 nimh pack and It will loop from level flight and inverted flight is good. Not enough power for sustained vertical or knife edge manuevers with the stock system but then again, more power = more $

Harvey