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John Stainforth

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Everything posted by John Stainforth

  1. I use an engine test bed screwed onto a B&D Workmate. But be warned: a Workmate is barely up to the task. One thing you must do is anchor the Workmate firmly to the ground so that it can't be pulled over (towards you, when you are starting the engine) by the engine's thrust etc.
  2. I am surprised that your club and instructor haven't thoroughly checked out the plane and its gear before taking to the air. Then, when things go wrong it is almost always pilot error. I very much doubt whether your NX6 and NX8 need to be sent back to the supplier for testing.
  3. Times have changed, and I think it is appropriate to adapt to these changes.
  4. The trouble is: it is not even 0.6% because china is building one new coal-fired 1 GW power station about every three days, which is partly being used for the manufactuing industry we have offshored. The only alternative that makes some sense, at the scale required (unless there is some unforeseen breakthrough) is solar - not PV but parabolic mirrors - in the Sahara and other deserts. This will require a lot of political will and international cooperation, which is not exactly in fashion worldwide and Britain.
  5. Superb aeroplane in superb hands. I think it's the world's most successful fighter jet. Although it is getting a bit old, one can see why the Ukrainians want them.
  6. Robert Stanford Tuck and George Stainforth wrote comparative notes on the flying performance of the Spitfire vs the ME109.
  7. I like to do tests like this, but I also check to see how much downward push I need when the plane is inverted; should only be slight. One test that I like to do, is to put the plane into a dead vertical climb to about 400 feet. Then cut the power completely and just let it fall out of the sky and take my hands off the sticks so that all the control surfaces are neutral. Very quickly the plane will be in a vertical dive. When the CG is about right I find the plane will have naturally pulled out to about 30 degrees from the vertical by the time it is about 100 feet above the ground. If it goes the other way, the CG is definitely too far back (but you probably knew that already!).
  8. A few minutes reading these sites has not revealed much anti-AMA sentiment. All the serious modellers I know in the US belong to AMA-recognised clubs, and I get most of my information from them.
  9. Practically everyone who is serious about aeromodelling in the US belongs to a club using an AMA-recognised site. You'd be a fool not to: litigation in the US against the uninsured doesn't bear thinking about.
  10. The AMA have not "completely failed" in the US. I think they did a pretty good job liasing with the US government during the development of the new regulations, which in practice are not very onerous at all. Any idea that the UK can part significantly from the standards being set for aviation elsewhere (in the EU, US etc) as a result of leaving the EU, is wishful thinking or political propaganda. The new regulations are largely safety-driven and are converging on a common "best-practice" world-wide.
  11. This is not my experience in the US. The pilot stations are usually alongside the runway, just behind the flight line, a few feet apart from each each (so communication is easy) and only about fifteen feet away from the plane as it passes down the runway during take-off or landing. Standard practice is to taxi up the runway to position B for take-off. (This is also a rather good practice in full-size aviation IMO!) The position of the pilot stations never changes, regardless of wind direction. The pilots decide whilst flying, by consensus, which way to land if the wind changes direction. Most clubs allow two people in each pilot station. Some also have a large collective pilot station where many pilots can stand together if they are doing formation or display flying. Personally, I have seen nothing to criticise in US model sites. Generally, they are exemplary, beautifully laid out, and with a great emphasis on safety.
  12. When the rear legs of a plane with trike u/c, splay out, the plane tends to sit on its wheels nose up. Then when one lands and the nose comes down, the nosewheel hits the ground prematurely and tends to bounce up increasing the angle of attack; more of a problem on hard runways than soft. This may be plane-specific, but it was certainly the case on several of my models.
  13. I don't use loctite for the reason you encountered. One thing I found, when I was learning landings and touch-and-goes on a hard strip, was that the rear wheels would get splayed out by heavy landings and then the plane would sit on the ground with the nose slightly up - which makes for bouncy landings. Better to bend the rear legs back into their correct positions or shorten the nose leg so that the plane always sits horizontal or slightly nose down. The other thing I found, with a steerable nose wheel coupled to the rudder, was to have only a very small movement on the nosewheel compared with the rudder.
  14. When my brother and I were something like 9 or 10 we tried small Jetex models, but basically got nowhere with them. We found Jetex to be totally feeble, at least that is what we thought at the time. (Mind you, this was an era when one could buy rather large fireworks cheaply and make some fairly large explosions, alongside which Jetex was nowhere.)
  15. For my scratch built S6b I used KlassKote epoxy paints, applied with a Sata Minijet air gun and compressor. I approached this painting stage with much trepidation, having never used KlassKote or a spray/gun compressor combination before, and I have to say it worked really well and turned out to be about the easiest part of the whole model build. KlassKote is expensive, but certainly well worth it on valuable models - and it's absolutely fuel proof.
  16. Snap!. My brother and I had a Veron Pinto with 1.5 cc ED Super Fury, also in 1961; also a bat-wing stunt plane - think it was a Veron Wombat. Out first planes (a large cardboard glider, and then a balsa glider) were in about 1959/60.
  17. My Great Planes Revolver with and OS 55AX, which I had in America, was definitely one of my favorite models. I did 100's of flights with this. It really cut through the air, so was an excellent all-weather flyer. Very strongly built, too.
  18. I think this standing behind or close to the model in the UK is a hangover from the early days of RC. Certainly when I started flying single channel models in the very early 1960's we stood very close to or behind the models for take-off. Once in the air, the standard practice then was to rotate one's body so that one was always facing more or less in the direction of flight of the model, so that we didn't have to think about reversing the direction of control when the plane was flying towards us. When I learnt to fly models again, properly, in the US in 2008, one of the first things my instructors told me was that I was moving around much too much. They taught me to stand with my legs quite far apart, absolutely square to the runway and not to move the lower body at all, and mainly just to turn one's head.
  19. In the UK this is surprisingly common, whereas in the US no-one is generally allowed onto or crossing the runway unless they are retrieving a plane, and then only after an acknowledged call-out; the pilot should be behind the flight line, which usually runs alongside the runway. It's an absolutely basic skill to learn to fly one's models from the side.
  20. My brother and I built about twenty free-flight, control-line and single channel RC models in the early 1960's all powered by diesels, made by DC, AM, ED. By far our favorite was the ED Super Fury 1.5 cc (which looks pretty like the ETA 15). because it had by far the best performance. My brother recently managed to get a good Super Fury off Ebay, and it runs perfectly. (Somewhere he has put up a link to a video, if I can find it.) I'm not really sure why diesels have gone out of fashion, because they are actually a very good option for those small engine sizes - and beautifully simple.
  21. Well done! Looks as though it flew perfectly (no surprise). Bold, though, to do the maiden flight so late in the day from such a small airstrip, but I suppose that just reflects the extreme competence of the whole team.
  22. I begin with a blank memory with a new model, like Jon, with everything set at the defaults (e.g. 100% throws). I set the servos and horns for maximum throws and mechanical advantage, and the control surface maximum throws in degrees (to say 30 or 45 degrees). One thing I am quite careful with is setting the servo horns on the splined shafts of the servos in the optimum positions (usually about 90 degrees to the pushrod). Those with 4 or 6 horns are cleverly designed so that they fit onto the splines subtly differently, so one can move the horns around to find the one that is in the optimum position on the shaft.
  23. Do you use a simulator? When I was learning I found a really good way to get more stick time was to use a simulator to more or less mimic what I was doing with the actual model. The Real Flight simulator I was using allowed one to adjust the properties of the computer model until they were very like the actual model.
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