Stefan Hafner

I take it you won't be going quite as detailed as this guy though ??? :P Very impressive all the same, if only we had the time for such things

Not sure if these are much useto you but here and here have good drawings of all of them, but you'll need to scale them and design your own structures.They also have some F-16 plans here but they are in dxf format and woul need to be scaled too. I think you should be able to get a free dxf reader/converter online though Hope this is of some help

Looks like a Pilatus PC 6 to me, never knew they had door guns though. Very nice paint job, bet the sharks mouth took a wile

Stretched here too, Vista 64 with firefox

Could you still see which way it was goinbg at that point? must have been a tiny wee speck at that height.

I think it would work with the filler too, as long as the repair isn't too flexible. The fine glass cloths, like the 25g/sqm only add about 0.1 - 0.2 mm thickness if done well, and that can be blended in pretty easily then. Sanding sealer is a good idea too, but won't that leave the area quite prone to dents after its done?

I think i would go along similar lines, but would use a layer of balsa temporarily on the inside to close the hole, the build up from the outside with balsa and then sand it back to the shape of the cowl. Then i'd put a layer of lightweight glass cloth over it to hold the shape, then use a dremel or similar to remove most of the excess balsa from the inside, and then add a few layers of slightly heavier cloth on the inside to give the whole thing strength. Then you can blend the outside in and give it coat of paint and no one will ever know Just a rough description, maybe a photo so we can be more specific?

Get in touch with FoamWIngs, very good quality, was very happy with the ones i got from him.

At that size you won't be replicating little mini rudders under the fuselage then?? Should be a cracker though

Definatly worth watching till the end

  Came across this video today, very impressive, makes a nice change from the usual twitchy fpv videos   Not sure about the music though Edited By Stefan Hafner on 24/02/2012 12:52:45

I've been given one of these and have set it up as in the manual, but just wondering if anyone has one that can offer some suggestions, as its my first plane of this sort?? looks like it should fly well, the weekend will reveal all anyway

Hi Terry I've not got any SC engines but on ASP (probably very similar) the crescent side faces towars the centre of the shaft. If you have a look at the manual if you have it have a look at the xploded view, it should show you there As for fuel, I use 10% with about 18% synthetic oil on all my engines, not sure what the mixtyre of Propower is but i would think it will be fine

Superb work here guys , will be watching

The only biplane i've heard of being used was one of the ones that a team made in 2008. They didn't use any bracing wires which was a shame as it could have done quite well, but none of them had any experience of model building The pilots that do the flying are all very experienced pilots, and not anyone from the teams, the organisers make sure they are skilled enough. The ease with which they took off i would guess is becaue they were lightly loaded, but they were allowed up to 3m span till 2007, but the winner that year weighed 14 kg so on safety grounds they reduced the span to 2m. At that time the weight were much higher than they are now i think. The £75 budget was for the airframe and covering, we wer given the radion and engines. Edited By Stefan Hafner on 15/02/2012 18:28:56

I think the speed data would make a huge difference, the issue being that most of the high lift profiles that are being used on these models have a nasty stall due to the hysteresis loop on the lift curve, ise stalling and the flow not re attaching untill the AoA has been reduced by about 5 degrees.  I can only speak for the Strathclyde prjects, but when we did it we had a budget of £75 that limited us somewhat, and we ended up having to look for sponsorship just to be able to use the carbon fibre stuff that we needed for ours, so while 2 planes would be ideal, it might be difficult, but then I don't know what sort of budget other teams have.

Thats exactly what we had to do Erfolg. It was dona as part of our course at uni and was worth about 20% of the markd for the year so we had to go through alll of the stuff you described above. We ended up learning a lot , especially about time management (everyone loves Gannt Charts :P). We did have an andvantage though in that I'd built and flown a lot of planes by then If you're interested in the sort of thing we came up with I can send you our report, don't want to link to it as Matt and team are meant to be doing it themselves.

You mentioned there being a pile of bits.......  This was the year before I did it, and they were still allowed 3m wingspans. The one at 2:22 is a good example of what happens when the strusture is too flexible, the tail boom on it was too bendy is what we heard from the techies at uni.

Oopps, sorry i thought you were using solid rod, really should read things properly

What about getting a 10mm rod and sanding it down??? not ideal and you'd need to take care as carbon is horrible stuff, but might work.

If anyones interested, i still have the photos in my album on here from the plane we built at uni for it. As Simon says, it'll be dead anyway in a crash so we went for full on light weight design, ended up with a plane that weighed 1.8kg if i rmember correctly and lifted about 4.5kg.  And important thing to remebre is that your underacrriage is long enough, so that you can rotate to a high angle of attack when your going for the highest load, or you'll never got off the ground.

Some people were duct-taping their planes back together, but they may well have changed the rules on safety grounds but you could check in the rules here, not sure if it mentions it. The tennis ball thing is new, and a bit of a nuisance, its almost forcing you to go the pusher route for whatever layout you use, but as myron says, the lifting body is really the way to go then. Myron, have to agree 100% that the drawings and report are as important, i remeber spending many long nights working on the drawings, but the highest drwing score made up for all the hard work

If i remeber correctly, the weight was a box about 3"x3"X6", but again it may have changed since then, but Matt will be able to tell us. There was nothing about speed, I seem to remember half the marks were from flying and the rest from oral presentations and documentaion and writeups.  My thinking was that a biplane using a very lightweight structure and getting a lot of strength from the bracing wires would be the lightest way I could think of (except a well designed lifting body), assuming that the parts can be made light enough, maybe cnc or laser cut??  As there were only 2 flights required most teams went for a lightweight but slightly more fragile structure, and hoped it lasted but at the sorts of weights in them in flight a crash usually writes off the plane

I did this challenge a few years ago as part of our course at uni, and one of the other teams there had a go at a biplane, but struggled as we were limited to a .40 size engine, not sure if that rule is still in place. The main issue they had was not having enough power, so make sure your engine is running well.  I assume its still judged on the total weight to airframe weight ratio? For this I think if you could pull off the biplane and make light it would do well, as the guys have already said with a reverse stagger it'll help. The one that the other team made when i did it was WAY over engineered so was a bit on the heavy side. I think many teams also used the Selig 1223 or similar wing sections, including the biplane, but i think for a biplane a lower drag coefficient will be more important than having the highest possible lift coefficient.  If i were to do it again I think I would go down the lifting body route.

I've used IDC connectors on a few planes now, they come in a range of sizes, from 10 pins to 20 pins. They are a bit of a pain to solder the cables to the connectors, but works really well. You can get them from maplins here or any other similar store. I usually cover the soldered wires in car body filler as the connectors are pretty small so to stop them beninging and breaking.  Edit: or you could use a 25 pin printer cable, as in my pic above, but i wouldn't recomend it as they are a bit of a nuisance to connect quickly. Edited By Stefan Hafner on 06/02/2012 11:18:20