After 5 years of flying rc, and loving pattern flying I have decided to hang up glow engines. When I started glow fuel was 10.00 a gallon. I just priced it locally and its $31.00 a gallon. With a son in college thats out of my price range. Especially when you have to practice alot.

My favorite plane is the venus II,maybe down the road I can convert to electric. Guess I will be unloading at the swap meets later this year. Personaly I think we are be taken for a ride by the glow manufacture's and I am getting off.

$20 bucks a gallon for me. iam slowly getting rid of all my glow and going gasoline.

What engine are you running? There may be much better options. Usually buy direct saves you some money. Or buying it at a trade show also helps as you can buy in bulk and not pay shipping.

Arch

Going to Electric because the cost of the fuel has always had me scratching my head. How much money do you really expect to save over the price of the glow fuel by buying what can easily exceed several thousand bucks or motors and batteries? For one airplane!

I find it funny when gas got high the people that traded in cars that got 20 mpg and bought cars that got 35 mpg. The first car was either paid for or traded in at a loss to buy a new car that costs $30,000. How many gallons of gas would they have to save to make up that $30,000?

Not to mention one crash and that expensive motor and battery are paper weights.

But if that makes you happy then by all means carry on.

And glow prices are artifically high at the moment because of the chinese production stoppage. Certainly not enough to make me change. I would imagine the prices should drop back down to arounc $22-24/gal for 30% heli soon.

Hi Arch: I fly an older saito 120 with the venus II. I fly the whole routine at half throttle. Its a blast to fly. I had been looking at the focus sport. I have made some calls to buy in bulk but no luck yet. I have been using omega pink 15 %. I appreciate the advice.

Oh yeah master tech I drive a ford focus 35 mpg paid $6500.00 in 2004, the car is a 2003 with a 120,000 miles on it.

I think you are lucky who only paid between 20 and 30 bucks for a gallon. Street price in Norway is about 45 - 50 bucks for a gallon of 15% nitro.

And the cousins of an electric drill could never compare with and glow engine with the nice smell and sound from a running engine.

No matter how much glow fuel is, it will still be cheaper than electric per flight. This is coming from a avid electric flyer. With our larger planes, batteries are expensive. The top brands are over $500 per set. True RC less than half that for a battery that weighs the same or less. (Most other cheap brands are much heavier). The track record of True RC is not really known yet in regargs to longevity. With your first electric flight on a new pack you will be overjoyed. Plenty of power, nice speed, less noise, no cleanup (my favorite), less vibration wear, much lower flight pack battery draw etc.
If you purchase a set of batteries (at least 2 probably 3) that start to lose their punch after 20 cycles, down 10 to 20% on max power you will start to realize why some people go back to glow after trying electric. The packs no longer pull over the top like they did when new that so impressed you on the first flights. Companies keep changing their cells (sometimes changing pack names, sometimes not) trying to find cells that hold up to our torture. Many many fliers will tell you of packs that lost their punch before even 50 flights. That is $10 per flight, and only an 8 minute flight at that. Of course many packs are holding up better than that, dropping the price per flight. One cell (I never owned any) that continues to get reported as higher than average cycle numbers is the TP pro lite 5300 packs. ( A newer version will be out soon)

I am hoping that True R/C finds the right cell as 2 5 cell 5000 packs are under $250 shipped. Hopefully the price from others will drop as well but it hasn't in the last couple of years as predicted.

I have no plans to switch away from electric. Perhaps if I was flying as much as I was in the 80's and early 90's I might change my mind

Stuart Chale

The Focus Sport is a great airplane. I'm not sure how it is for elec though. Looking at the cost of outfitting that Focus Sport with a YS 1.10 (which is what it was designed for) is much cheaper than the electric, cost at start up anyway. There is a down side to both. There is also an upside to both.

The engine you have now should work fine in the Focus. Given that fact the elec option is far more costly at start up it's not a money saving thing. Using the cost of glow fuel as a basis for switching to elec is just strikes me as funny. Watching the guys in my club that have switched to Electric the learning curve is steep and they've all ruined batteries in short order. There are a few that fly enough each week in a few years they will realize a savings by the switch. If they don't crash.

The price of the Cool Power will definitely come down. I would definitely start looking at other hobby shops, that is RIDICULOUSLY high for that fuel. Even with the price increase I've seen it in San Antonio for around 20 a gallon. I bet if you do some checking you will be able to find a much better price than that. Have you contacted Morgan Fuels? Power Master will also work very well.

Arch

It's a tough thing to have to deal with Yellerchamp. Pay the price that's dictated for nitro, or the price dictated for good batteries. My opinion (and I have $2300 worth of useless Flight Powers sitting here) is that electric is as cheap as glow in the long run. Maybe not on the first plane, but in setting up a second plane it is as you already have the batteries. I'm trying the TrueRc packs, and like them for now. Time will tell, but I'll probably try the new Thunder Power 5200's, or go back to the 5300's.
If fuel was $15 a gallon for the new Dz's, I would consider setting up a glow plane also. The Dz's are great motors and produce well. The price of Nitro and the Dz keeps me from going back to glow. Not the difference between glow and electric. Just the price to switch back.

Make sure it's really what you want before you switch. Glow will come back down, but it's like gas (or most Lipo's), it will never be cheap again.

Chris

Hi Chris,
What's the story with your flightpower's.
If I remember correctly you were saying they were bulletproof.

Brian

The Astro chargers that I used to use, overcharge in the 3rd cycle. The newer 5350 cells don't like being overcharged. The older 3700 cells that I used to fly didn't mind, but the newer cells are a different chemistry and can't handle being overcharged. Flight Power was good enough to lend me some packs for the nats though. I have since switched to different chargers. This was the first time I've had any issue's with batteries.
Lets face it, electrics will still be in the learning stage for quite some time. That's why I say, make sure it's what you want before switching. Because mistakes (that you don't even know about) can cost you a lot of money.
With the new line of Dz's, the power and speed range is certainly there for the glow planes. I was really impressed with them at the nats.

Chris

Yeller champ,

You might want to consider a gassie from BME engines. They have an ST 90 conversion to gasoline that looks very interesting. The crankshaft is new for gas and bearings are actually changed to allow low oil use (3% oil in gas in fairly typical). It's a little pricey at 400$ but weight is very manageable at 26ozs plus the ignition box and battery (another 7 ozs or so, but most of this weight would be offset by the reduced amount of fuel you'd carry). Should be able to use a pipe on the engine and it should be at least the equal to the Saito 120 in terms of output.

If I had a smaller model, that's the way I would go. Running 15 minutes on 6 ozs of gas sounds pretty reasonable to me

MattK

matt,
I agree that gas is probably the overall cheapest way to fly. I never considered large electric, because the battery cost is overwhelming. Most fliers don't fly near enough to even be in the same ball park cost wise with glow. The question I have is: do gas two strokes throttle any better than their glow counterparts? I've been using an OS140 for 5 or six years now (same engine) adn I like it's ease of use, but I like the instant throttle response you get from 4 strokes better. Especially when your backing off the throttle. Sometimes my 1.40 "winds" down more slowly than I like.
Jeff

Roger that!
An you guys in the US think you're getting scre#ed![sm=bananahead.gif]

As a side note... a buddy of mine said that they've been buying Lipo packs for their F3A planes, direct from Hong Kong, at 20% of the high street price!
From what they can tell, the cells appear to come from the same manufacturer as the "branded" packs.
And they're holding up perfectly.

Hummm... 6 packs at a price just over the cost of one branded.
Yeap... somebody's making a lot of money.[sm=50_50.gif]

Hi David,
Details of those cheap lipo's please.

Brian

I hope to start flying pattern again next year, after about a five year hiatus. I am working on getting a .110 size electric together. The priice of glow fuel is not a factor. Electric gives me a little more flexibility in finding practice sites. My current flying site involves a twenty mile drive to a site that is endangered by the widening of Stata Highway 76. The money saved on glow fuel might make up for the cost of batteries for a .50 sized plane. At .110 size, it would be cheaper for me to fly 2m glow. I can only dream about comming up with discretionary budget for a 2m electric.

Just because the cells come from the same manufacturer doesn't mean they are assembled the same. The cheaper packs seems to have higher resistance cells IMO. Not as well matched to each other either. Therefore having a lesser lifespan. I'm guessing that the cells that aren't as good as the one's used by the "name" manufacturers are much cheaper for them to buy, therefore costing us less. But we are getting a lesser product.

Chris

Your post is exactly the opposite on how I came into flying glow planes. I wanted to buy an Pulse XT 25e because I wanted to get into flying bigger planes. (That's how it works right?) I was just about to buy one when I seen how much one battery was going to cost -$100! [sm=eek.gif] Of course you can't just have one battery, you have to have at least two of them, three if you want to continue to fly at the field all day doing a fly/charge cycle. So a friend of mine sold me a Pulse XT with an OS .46 on it and I haven't looked back. I still have a small electric I fly around my front yard with and an electric AP plane, but for me it's all glow for now. I'll probably switch to gas down the road, but right now I'm having a blast.

Frank

PS I just bought a gallon of 20% yesterday. $18 and some change out the door.

18 bucks. Wow.. Decent price..

The way I look at it now is that we're all in the same hobby. I thought electric was the greatest thing when I got into it 5 years ago. Still think it's great, but it's like glow, it has it's issue's.
Batteries, yeah, they're costly, but like I said, set up 2 pattern planes of the same size with a glow motor such as the YS, pipes, and mounts, and we're easily in the same ball park. I don't need extra batteries at that point. After you put out the initial $'s in electric, I feel it's cheaper. But regardless, I don't like the smell of lipo's.. And I love me some glow smell!!!!!!!!

All that matters is exactly what Muroc1 says "he's having a blast". If (glow or electric) gets you to that point, why would you change?

Chris