Jump to content

John Bisset

Members
  • Posts

    251
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by John Bisset

  1. I made some floats for my Wot 4 a few years back, hotwire cut from foam and covered with Solartex. I modified them after the first few flights to extend the float noses, because there was so much spray thrown up. Float noses slightly longer than - ahead of aircraft nose worked well for me and avoided spray and reduced dig in potential.
  2. My son used a Precedent FlyBoy as his first trainer. Worked well and he easily transitioned onto the Wot 4, which we ran for a while with limited throws. The Wot4 makes a good docile trainer, with the potential to become more manoeuvrable and lightly aerobatic later. Good slow flying characteristics. Used that to train several people, all pilots of full size aeroplanes as well.
  3. Thanks Martin - I do recall the pressure form DfT but had not noticed any comment about making labelling removable. Sloppy of me & unfair to blame the CAA for that. Luckily a little IPA (the chemical not the beer!) has taken the markings off my models without damage. John B
  4. So, if I understand the past few posts correctly, we are now expected to change last year's absurdly long numbers for another set of absurdly long numbers that don't meet the EASA standard (which would at least give some purpose to al this!) and may be simply randomly generated nonsense numbers. Hmm. I agree the effort is trivial Martin, but so is this requirement. If it meets no international standard, why bother? It just annoys me to be expected tor remove the darn number I painted and wrote on all my models last year, for some arbitrary tomfoolery by a bored civil servant ! I think I should ask again- has anyone actually been asked for a number yet? Is any of this worth doing? It seems to me that if 'the authorities' were to successfully write down my existing, now out of date, number they could figure fairly quickly whose model they are looking at - or do they throw away all 'old' records? So it does its job for now anyway. Maybe I should wait till after a suitable furore has been made and the numbers are 'adjusted' to allow British modellers to use their machines overseas, then write on the final useful number... Eheu. Truly they do manage to be the Campaign Against...
  5. The snag is that 'final' doesn't appear to mean to them what it does to you and me. After more than 50 years of involvement in flying, full size & model in this country (and elsewhere), I am certain that there is little which is actually 'final'. I thought the number we were each given last year was the EASA related one, while this effort is to show the CAA now 'going it alone', no doubt to demonstrate that we in the UK can do our own thing (sigh!). If nit - why did we not wait a year - has anyone had their number checked? Why we need what sounds to be an impressively large subset of Avagadro's number for such a simple thing beats me - what was wrong with using our BMFA membership numbers anyway? - perfectly traceable ! (And of course our numbers from last year are also traceable!) And as someone else said - what chance anyone noting that long string number will get it right? How to make a difficult hash of something simple and in fact un-necessary. These are the people who tell us to understand the rules, criticise or prosecute us if we fail, make the darn rules hard to find or understand - try looking up Notams 'officially' - and then they tell us as pilots that keeping things simple and clear is good for safety. Ye gods! (My apologies folks - a full size flying mini-rant as well as a n r/c modelling one ! ) My thought wrt the CAA match those of 'Zflier', sadly. The best of them are superb, but all too often today they fall into bureaucracy mode. Sigh. Onwards & upwards - soon!
  6. I must be doing something wrong. Every time I try to log in, the system fails to recognise my password. I have reset this three times now -and remembered to save as I thought (at the bottom of the pw change page). Still the same, on a return, not recognised. Anyone else having this problem? John B
  7. David, I have done as you described and gone to look at 'Marketplace'. I see 'sale items from 2017 listed. Shown as emails - surely these are not still active? Seems improbable., Have these simply nit been weeded out? Previously, it was possible to see at a glance what sort of items were offed for sale by forum members in different categories. Is that still possible? Regards, John Bisset
  8. The last two postings make the point. Vaccination reduces the probability of infection and should - by encouraging the body to develop early response, reduce severity of any infection in most cases. Care is still going to be sensible, especially for the really vulnerable and we are still learning about vulnerabilities across the broad spectrum of people. A second vaccination improves the odds and, it is thought, should aid longevity of protection - that is less certain - we haven't been vaccinating enough folk for long enough to have a good handle on that yet. What the optimum revaccination cycle will be is also unknown yet. Things are improving; Rome wasn't built in a day ! Politicians and media folk want/would like simple instant answers and simple instant solutions. Science, engineering and the real world don't work that way I'm afraid.
  9. Hi Murat, thanks. The Petrel and the Gull were quite similar in appearance and given that Sling developed the Petrel after building some Gulls including one that had a cantilever wing, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a design link, although the Petrel was supposedly derived from the Rhonadler. Interesting machines. I see Graham Saw owns the only remaining airworthy Petrel. I wonder if the Gull in the National Museum in Edinburgh is the one in that photo - there won't have been many up in Scotland. John B
  10. That is it - thank you both. I had a feeling this site would come up trumps! John B
  11. Maybe we are being overly pessimistic. Looking at what, for example, Balsa Cabin and SLEC are saying, there should be supplies of balsa in future. These will be more expensive, so looking for alternative woods & materials is sensible of course. I suspect some of the rapid emptying of supplies at SLEC has been aided by to members on here doing a wee bit of - dare I say it - panic buying. (or 'stocking up, just in case'. Remember the toilet riol follies! Started to do the same, then realised I haven't got a clear idea of what I need. So, I will wait. The sad thing is that I bet quite a bit of that now stored balsa will not be used. Eventually some will return via local club sales etc. Cheers, John B
  12. Can anyone identify this old glider? Photo taken at Dyce probably late 50s early 60s. I thought it to be a Slingsby Petrel or a Minimoa, but then saw the wing struts. A friend wandering down memory lane sent it and asked if I knew it. Cheers, John B
  13. "After 1st Jan we are adopting the EASA format.." Thanks Andy. With all the rest of the nonsense(s) going on I'd forgotten about EASA ! John B
  14. That Panda video is super. I wonder if it was deliberately set up for fun; that zookeeper obviously knows and likes those pandas. A very happy bit of playing going on!
  15. Posted by Andy Symons - BMFA on 15/10/2020 21:51:47: Posted by Dane Crosby on 15/10/2020 20:50:13: I thought that I would obtain my new Operator number today as I will be flying on Saturday. I have now stuck my old number on to the machine but will no doubt have to peel it off and stick on a new one. This is due to information I have heard that the CAA may well change our operator numbers upon renewal. Ho Hum............... If you renew before 1st Jan your number will stay the same for 1 more year, if your renew after 1st Jan it will be in the new format which will then be permanent.   Sigh. I don't suppose there was any explanation from the Campaign Against Aviation as to why they will change the ruddy format, was there, Andy?   Edited By John Bisset on 16/10/2020 16:02:10
  16. Thank you 'john davidson 1'- that is a darn good point, and one I had forgotten. My dictionary says the same. It is perhaps because of the common modern English usage, that 'shall' was used instead in our formal documents- to avoid that ambiguity!   'fly boy3' - they are quite cheap yes, though quite probably CO rather than CO2. Both can kill but the former is the one that easily results from part blocked flues and poorly burning stoves. More deadly because it ties up the haemoglobin. In many light aeroplanes we also have CO detectors, the simplest being a spot detector - it turns dark when CO hits it.   Edited By John Bisset on 12/10/2020 22:26:19
  17. Thank you Shaun. I had found that one - it repays re-reading. I note it is titled 'Guidance' only and that 'should' is frequently used within it. That implies a level of choice is acceptable; when I wrote something I required to be done I used 'shall' and 'must', so I think there is some careful writing here. I agree with you - I don't see how compliance will be checked, nor is it strictly anyone else's business what risks I choose to take (while not affecting others) although 'tis possible the insurance companies may start to ask about this sort of thing. Cheers, John B
  18. Thanks 'flight1'. Sounds as if you had heard of this some time ago - it came as a surprise to me. If carbon monoxide alarms do not need interlinking, super - that simplifies things a bit. Not sure that my boiler room needs a carbon monoxide alarm; it is not 'habitable' and I regularly have the flues swept. That seems a 'tolerable standard' by my measure, or at least a point on which to argue! . The 10 year battery life sealed units - I debate how eco-friendly that is. Possibly the sensors ate apt to die by then anyway, which would 'excuse' the throwaway. Do the sensors degrade with time- seems probable. (Is it only me or does this seem to be a bit ' horse & stable door' reaction to Grenfell etc?)
  19. Hi all. Having greatly enjoyed some of the recent chit chat queries & comments, I find I now have one of my own. An advertising note through my door has alerted me to a forthcoming change in the law, relating to smoke & heat alarms. (In Scotland - the rest of the UK may well be doing the same but I don't know what the timings are.) It seems that as well as smoke alarms, we are now being required to fit heat alarms - in kitchens at least - and carbon monoxide alarms wherever there is a fuel burners within a room. Fine within limits, though there seems to be some doubt as to whether alarms have to interconnected or whether that is a 'should' not a 'shall' item. I am unhappy with interconnection, having had the devil of a job tracing and eliminating a faulty linkage in an over complex set up, which kept producing spurious alarms. Eventually I simplified the arrangement. I am also unclear to what extent these rules are relevant to a private home as opposed to a property for rental. Mine is a private house, not for rent. All the references I can find discuss 'tolerable standards'; which are for properties for rent. Does anyone have a good handle on this? Previous experience make me reluctant to interlink, and my house design would make wired interconnects of new alarms a pain to retrofit. I dislike over complexity because it increases failure rates - and people ignore warnings if too many false alarms occur.
  20. That is a fascinating and most intriguing video, Cuban8, thank you. Definitely a link I shall forward to my kids & grandkids. Like you, I didn't think that rotor speed excessive - it's similar to the max RPM on my fullsize motor glider at take-off. Noise sounds similar too. The difficulty of flying manually is less surprising . Even if the system was able to allow for the gyroscopic lag, the skittishness of a light beast like that would be hard to deal with! That so much power is used just keeping things warm I had not thought about - and interesting that CO2 alone provides enough thermal insulation. I would not be at all surprised if some of the team are modellers, in fact I'd be surprised if there aren't modellers amongst them looking at the craft arrangement. (And just imagine the offcuts & discards potential !) Superb engineering to very tight limits I shall be crossing fingers for a successful launch and transit to Mars. I was also much impressed by the way they spoke of the mission - the flights were 'we are going to take-off' etc.  Hearst & souls in the task. And what a multi national team...    Edited By John Bisset on 29/07/2020 10:48:05
  21. And of course on older systems, remember to extend the transmitter aerial. Something I forgot tonight. Brief and spectacular aerobatics. My Wot4 now needs a rebuilt fuselage. Bah humbug. (That wing is impressively tough though. Still reasonably intact after twenty years and on its third fuselage! ) Pre-flight checks not quite complete = null points. Doesn't matter how many years I've been doing this flying game, it is still depressingly easy to make a pig's ear of it. The only bright spot is that at least I did that with a model, not the full size. A cheap lesson and mental rap over the knuckles. Edited By John Bisset on 17/07/2020 22:59:02
  22. I wonder if posting a post magnifies your chances, or does the draw from the box roll on regardless? OK - a rubbish effort, even by my low standards. Yes please, count me in. John B
  23. Than ks John Lee, that is what I thought. The power pod does add a wee bit of drag - must look more deeply into my (Spektrum DX6) radio to set up a control for pop up, no power. Thank you Dennis, very kind & useful. That is not far from what I normally aim for. With varying success, no crashes so far, touch wood.  I have to say that losing height in the turn when starting at 'just above eye height' only works readily for me if conditions are benign. Rather fraught otherwise. My normal flying site tends to have turbulence off trees and hangars, to add excitement. My personal preference is for a glide approach, hence some means of increasing drag would be handy. I admit that does come also from full size habit - I have never liked dragging in under power. (I also tend to default to the continuous curving turn to finals, again from full size practice. That picture sits well in ,y mind) Also laziness, - good airbrakes or draggy flaps make landings easier and more fun. I do like to slow landings for a proper flare. Long flat low drag stuff doesn't look neat to me!   Not relevant to the Salto of course, but is 'crow braking' the use of both aileron and flaps simultaneously - ailerons both up and flaps down? I am intrigued at suggestions of the both ailerons up option for other sailplanes- presumably that needs some loads trimmed out at the tail ? Edited By John Bisset on 10/07/2020 12:47:36 Edited By John Bisset on 10/07/2020 12:48:31
  24. Hi all. One of my 'bought not built' models is an ST Salto. A super wee flier that climbs well and aerobats nicely - or would if I was a better pilot. Landings however are really long flat affairs. The machine is so low drag that I have to approach really low. Two questions - Has anyone modified one of these to add more drag? I wondered about trailing edge airbrakes, if I could find space in the cockpit fpr another servo. Is it worth trying to sideslip to add drag. I have never tried that in a model, though it works well in the fullsize - or at least in the Libelle which has fairly poor airbrakes and is quite similar to the Salto. I am not sure I can balance aileron with rudder well enough in a model. Any thoughts? John B
×
×
  • Create New...