EvilC57

I’d rather watch any of them than some of the tripe that’s been on at Glastonbury this year. Oh no, I sound just like my grandad 👴🤪!

It’s 64g (2.25oz) with the battery fitted. That actual flight time might be slightly longer than I said. I haven’t flown it for a while and couldn’t remember the flight time exactly when I wrote the post yesterday, so I just checked what the count down timer is set to on my Tx - and that says 2m 30s.

A quick search on eBay for ‘fx702 chuck glider’ brings up several different coloured ones 🙂.

I built one of these small cheap foamies several years ago now. I’d seen the small FX702 chuck gliders in Lidl among other places, and looking closely at one, came to the conclusion that it ought to be possible to remove the separately moulded canopy and scoop out whatever foam was underneath to create a cavity for the radio gear, battery etc.. And then cut the fixed control surfaces loose to liberate them from the wing and tail mouldings. A micro receiver/brushed ESC, two micro servos and a small coreless drone motor later, this was the result (see pics). It flies well for about two and a half minutes on a 500mAh 1S lipo. The challenge was getting the thrust line of the motor correct for neutral handling, but on a calm day now it flies very well outdoors. I tried it a few times at my club’s indoor sessions, but it was a bit too fast and got banned!

I had an email from Bambu today pointing me to the Bambu UK website, where I notice there appears to be a Flash Sale on with some substantial price cuts across the range. Tempting I must say… Does it mean there’s some new models coming soon though I wonder?

👍

I did a lot of research on filament driers before I bought the Eibos Easdry. Some of them, including the Sunlu drier which seems to be the most heavily advertised, only have a heating element in them, but no extractor fan. All this does is drive out the moisture, which then condenses on the inside of the lid (being the coolest part of the chamber). So the filament reel is just sitting in a warm, moist environment. The Eibos drier has a clever arrangement which sucks outside air in with a fan, heats it and distributes it around the reel, before blowing it out through separate exhaust vents. The unit also has an area where small desiccant bags can be dried, and a humidity meter so you can actually see the air inside getting drier. The instructions suggest different drying periods and temperatures (adjustable by the knob on the front) for different filament types. If I know I’m going to be using a particular reel of filament later, I usually put it in the Eibos for a couple of hours first. The unit does have small holes in it so that you could keep a reel inside it, and feed the filament straight out to the printer from there. I don’t do that though, as it doesn’t suit my setup. You can tell straight away if PLA filament is damp, because it becomes brittle. So I just do a simple bend test. If I bend it backwards & forwards a couple of times and it snaps off, it means it’s too damp to use. Filament that’s brittle can snap inside the feed tube to the hot end, then you’ve got to try and get the broken pieces out - not to mention the adverse affects of the moisture content boiling off and bubbling up inside the hot nozzle.

I’ve had similar problems with filament near the end of a reel of PLA, I just couldn’t get it to print cleanly on my Ender 3 V2. Using a new reel with all the same print settings was fine. It’s important to keep filament dry, do you have a decent filament drier? I use an Eibos filament drier and always store my filament in vacuum bags to ensure it’s dry.

Despite using them for undercarriage mounts over the years, I can’t remember ever actually breaking a plastic bolt. I’ve always found that the wood around the area fails first.

In my experience, the trouble with too much reinforcement around undercarriage mountings is that if you have a subsequent hard ‘arrival’, the next weakest thing will break instead, and you’ll just rip out an even larger area of the bottom of the fuselage. It’s often best to have a deliberately fairly weak sacrificial area, which is strong enough to remain in place in normal service but will rip out cleanly in a crash. I had an section similar to yours break out in an Extra 330 I had, I used to glue it back in with four fairly small dabs of epoxy, which as I say would normally stay in place, but just break in the same place if I got it wrong on landing.

Those as well yes!

This young lady is quite popular with the chaps in our club for a couple of reasons!

Kitchen worktop bench in my shed, with two layers of cork tiles stuck on top.

I took the pictures below in Lhasa, Tibet on a holiday there in 2018. The symbol has a completely different meaning there, were it is a symbol of divinity and spirituality. It's unfortunate (to say the least) that it was hijacked in the 1930s for more nefarious purposes.

A pair of Merlin helicopters. They went around several times at a couple of hundred feet while I was in the back garden cutting the grass this morning, but unfortunately being a dull day my pics were not very good. I live not too far from MOD Abbey Wood (the ministry procurement place in Bristol), and I think they land near there sometimes to show the ministry staff what they’re spending our money on. Indeed a couple of years ago I was cycling near there, and a military Puma was going in and out of a local playing field giving what appeared to be civilian MOD staff joyrides around the area.