EvilC57

One of our chaps turned up with a decent camera at the field one day last week, and took these for me while I flew around with my Multiplex 330SC and Pushy Cat. Then 3 of us got together with our Phase 3 EF-16s.

It’s a shame the EF16 is not still available. It made an ideal first EDF, relatively fast when you want it to be, but comes in to land quite slowly because it’s so light. I’m on my second one, which is one of my regular all weather hacks. I don’t keep count, but it must have had hundreds of flights by now. Several people in our club still have them, and sometimes we’ve managed to get 4 or 5 of them all whizzing around together ?.

Yep, that’s the theory I work on with my EF16. Mainly white on top, and black underneath.

This is my well worn Phase 3 EF16 EDF foamie, which as you can see is painted black on the bottom. Despite being small and fast, it’s easy to see, and distinguish top from bottom, even at a distance. It’s painted with Daler & Rowney acrylic, which is available in art & craft shops. I’ve used the same range of paints on a number of EPP and Depron models without any problems.

Also a little late. The Beaufort Model Flying Club in north Bristol. Weather not the best for us, with rain threatening, and a bad wind direction for our field. We got 26 airborne at the final count though.

Weather not great in Bristol area, but rain held off long enough for us to get 28 in the air. No mid airs, but a couple temporarily lost in outfields.

The weather is not lookng good for tomorrow's flights, with most forecasts showing the remains of the overnight rain that's coming, to still be around at midday. Are there any contingency plans to do it on a different day if we all get rained off?

All speed controllers are different. I have some which won’t arm if I’ve accidentally left the throttle kill switch in the ‘kill’ position on the Tx when powering the model up, and some that aren’t bothered and arm anyway.

Sounds like you need to do a throttle calibration on the ESC. For most ESCs you need to set the throttle stick on the transmitter to wide open (100%), then power up the model and wait for a couple of beeps from the ESC before closing the throttle. This tells the speed controller what PWM pulse widths to expect from the receiver as the top & bottom ends of throttle. Check on your Tx as well by using the channel monitor in the menu, that the throttle is moving between 0% and 100% as you move the stick up and down, and that you haven’t got any strange throttle curves programmed in.

I have this one, which I bought from 4-Max about 4 years ago. It’s OK except that mine has developed a couple of faults. One of the two fans has developed noisy bearings, which grumble for the first few minutes of charging until everything warms up. Cheap sleeve bearings I guess. One of the channels won’t correctly charge any battery over 2S now. The same channel will not do internal lipo resistance readings on anything more than a 2S pack - a different symptom of the same fault in the channel I suspect. So not the most reliable of units, although still in regular use as my main charger.

So time to start practicing that knife edge then, if the model will handle it. That’ll get you using the rudder.

Warm ethylene glycol antifreeze is good for cleaning castor oil stains off engines and exhausts. I read it somewhere (maybe on this esteemed forum, previous post excepted), tried it, and found it works a treat with a bit of scrubbing with an old toothbrush, where no other solvent or cleaning fluid would. I’ve got several engines sparkling again with this method now, but you do have to be careful, as ethylene glycol is flammable and gives off toxic fumes when heated, so do it outside.

I've been selling off a number of old modelling items on eBay over the last few months on behalf of our club, with the proceeds going to charity. Someone recently gave me a dozen or so assorted 35MHz Futaba receivers, and a variety of Tx/Rx crystals to try and sell. To my amazement most of them have now sold to people all over the UK. Which begs the question, how many people still fly on 35MHz? Most in our club are exclusively on 2.4GHz (we did away with our peg board years ago), and of my 20 or so models only one is still on 35MHz.