Michael Rogg

My Vickers REP in flight...

Hello Seamus and others I´ve read your ideas and questions with interest, since I also want to build a Blackburn Monoplane. I bought the DB kit when I was in England 25 years ago. It´s still there. But I want to design a more scale like 30 % model or so. I took some fotos at Old Warden then, but if there is anybody out there who has got detailled information for me, please let me know. As for your models: I am very interested in those old planes and have experimented a lot with wing warping and so on. Meanwhile I fly my third stand off scale REP vickers - successfully at last. It spans 2,5 m and is powered by a Saito 170 R3 engine. It´s my first model with wing warping that flies really well. I used the RAF 15 section and built in about 2 degrees of incidence, 3 degrees of dihydral on each side. There is about 0,5 degree of wash out (? = tips raised), too. If you build such a model like the full size aircraft and install a closed-loop system which is pulled from underneath the fuselage, you will get enormous adverse yaw, forcing your model the wrong way when applying "aileron". So how did I overcome that problem? I built in TWO servos for wing warping, one for each wing. Thus you can progamme only a third of "up aileron" on "down aileron" or so on your transmitter. Besides, this helps to increase pull from the top. It works really nicely. The RAF 15 performs really well, too: The model climbs at full throttle, but you can easily control that with a bit of down elevator. Stall is no problem and the speed range of the model is OK. It flies like an aeroplane, not like a kite. So I have decided to use the same ideas and techniques on my bigger Blackburn Monoplane, which is yet to be designed.