Dave Hess

You could use an ordinary wattmeter. Run the battery a bit first to get away from the steeper part of the discharge curve. connect the wattmeter and note the voltage. Give the motor full throttle and note the new voltage and current when at full or any steady speed. The internal resistance = (original voltage -running voltage)/running current. There are also these cheap meters that work, but I think you might need a load resistor. **LINK**

When the Bi-Fly was in it's hayday, servos were big and heavy, so using a single one could have been an advantage, but now we have plenty of strong lightweight servos, so I think two servos have the upper hand.

Posted by Stearman65 on 21/11/2018 07:27:48: I know who I'll be using in the future & it won't be Hobby King. I think that'll be your loss. I've been using HK for donkeys years, and I've had a 100% success rate of getting good stuff at good prices. the only thing I don't like about them is that their search engine brings up nearly everything rather than what you're searching for.

Posted by Fatscoleymo on 21/11/2018 16:01:14: Buy a bunch of short extension leads for next to 'nowt and a 'roll' of extension cable from Hobbyking or Bangood.Cut the leads in two, solder in and heatshrink whatever length of cable you need. Not difficult to do. Six small soldered joints for each extension cable. You will always have materials around to make exactly what you need. I too tried the crimping method years ago and it was so frustrating and never did manage to get it done correctly.   This what I do too. It's dead simple and takes no time. I do it slightly differently: Take two single extension leads whatever length you want; Cut them in half and throw away the one half you don't need, leaving three halves; Strip all the ends; Lay the two identical halves on top of each other, twist the three pairs of matching wires together and tin them; Tin the three wires on the other half; Thread on a bit of heat-shrink over one side and push it up the wire away from the wire end; Hold the matching wires together and reheat them to solder them together; Pull the heat-shrink over the joint and shrink it. Job done. Dead simple and takes about 3 minutes. No special tools needed! Edited By Dave Hess on 21/11/2018 17:11:06

Posted by Bob Smitham on 20/11/2018 21:47:58:But from reading the forum the step up in weight when going from foam-blasa/gas would be like starting over from scratch. I wouldn't say that's at all true. I fly foam-board planes all the time now. I wouldn't say that their flying characteristics are anything different to anything else. By that, I mean that there are a range of models that each have equivalent characteristics to anything else that could be a different size or shape or power. The main attraction for me is that they're cheap and quick to build. I just like to fly for fun. Its man and machine in harmony while pushing to the limits. Some people are happy just seeing a big plane cruising around the sky, but that just doesn't do it for me. Everybody'sdifferent. Every plane flys differently. There's a fair difference between three channel rudder control an 4ch with ailerons, and there's a fair difference between a 4ch with low/mid wings compared with high wings. Whatever planes you choose, you want to progress from easy upwards. If you want to fly on your own, cheap is the best way to go. If you want to spend hours tied to another pilot with a buddy box, you can get whatever floats your boat.

It's not easy to see from the photo, but it looks like they've been snipped. There should be threads on them onto which you screw the height-adjustable terminals. Something like this:

At my old club in the day of the Bi-Fly, all the other guys fitted hot 60s in theirs. They didn't half go! I don't think it makes a massive difference how you do the servos. Mine had a single one with torque arms. Maybe if you wanted a bit more precision in your flying, two would be better.

If I was in your position, I'd be looking at a 4S battery and a 5x3 or thereabouts propeller. That will give you about 30% more power at approximately the same current. Some ESCs aren't happy with 4S, so you need to see exactly which one you have and check the spec sheet. If you're lucky, it'll be written on the ESC's label. In the worst case a new ESC would only be £7.50 from Hobbyking. I did a load of thrust tests with different propellers on a small motor like yours. Using different pitch and quality props of the same diameter didn't make a lot of difference to the thrust, but changing the voltage made a big step difference. As the voltage goes up, you have to go down in propeller diameter to keep the current the same. A wattmeter will show you exactly where you are currentwise, but if you go down an inch in diameter for each cell you add, you won't be far off. Edited By Dave Hess on 18/11/2018 12:33:00

I came back to the hobby a few months ago after a break like yours. I've already flow more than a dozen new planes and a couple of my old balsa ones. I have two Wat4s - an original balsa one and the Foam E one. If I were doing it again with what I know now, I'd go straight for the Flitetest Sportster. It has a very wide flying envelope. On low rates and low throttle, it's more docile and controllable than most trainers. Turn the rates up and it can do some crazy things. It's really a lot of fun to fly. You can build one in about three evenings from the free plan even if you don't have much building skill. Also, they're really cheap at about £7.50 for the board, less than £20 for the motor and ESC, £4 for the servos and £4.70 for a suitable receiver, so about £50 for the whole thing You can get all the electrical stuff from Hobbyking UK in 48 hrs. Flitetest also sell kits and electrical packs, but these things are so easy to make that you don't really need them. Here's the build video. Skip to the end to see the demo of it flying.

Most plastics lose their strength and flexibility when exposed to sunlight/UV. I guess they're worried about that, but if you kept your plane or propellers in a dark place, they'll outlast you.

i have exactly that one. It works, but it's not easy to regulate the heat and the gas flow. I've used other more expensive ones that work much better.Why not just get a normal 60w mains one?

Check out the RCSaylors.. They test and review these things all the time without much commercial bias, They seem to like the Bugs 3H

I lost a bigger chunk from mine. To repair it, I trimmed it to a clean triangle shape with a scalpel, then cut a new wedge from some packaging that came with my last TV, glued it in with foam-safe cyano, and finally trimmed it to match the surrounding shape with the scalpel. It's as good as new now,

Posted by Stearman65 on 16/11/2018 09:35:12: Talk about being all over you like a rash, my god, what a company!!! I made the mistake of ordering from them, 3 items 2 lipos & a charger, one of the lipos was in their european w/h & the other 2 items in stock in the UK. Since the order on the 14th, I've had 9 emails, to the effect that " we are transferring your order to the dispatch area" "we have packed your items safely in a box", "The box contents have been checked" Bla bla bla. Then to top it all I got another email to say the items were ready for collection 200 miles away, bring ID. Someone is supposed to be contacting me. Luckily I paid by Paypal, If nothing positive transpires by the end of today I'll cancel, they have broken their contract. I know it's black Friday, but this is ridiculous. I find the Hobbyking ordering and shipping system absolutely fantastic as long as you understand how it works. It looks like you selected the option to collect from the warehouse rather than pay for shipping. It's the first option and says "Free". Key points for ordering from HK: Shipping is free for orders over £50 Whenever you select anything for ordering, check which warehouse it's available from. Easiest is to only order from UK. Prices are cheaper from USA, but shipping and duty will push it up. If you're order is small and from multiple warehouses, you get multiple shipping costs

LiFePO4 will be fine, but be aware that it has different discharge characteristics from lipo. It charges to 3.65v per cell, which drops to 3.33v per cell and stays there throughout the discharge until it's nearly empty, when the voltage starts to go down rapidly, so checking it doesn't give you much idea of how much charge is left.

Posted by Frank Skilbeck on 15/11/2018 16:10:52: When you say the BEC wouldn't work do you mean the servos wouldn't operate. One "feature" of modern 2.4 systems is that the position voltage/current is quite low and if the servo requires a strong position signal and they don't like sharing it on a Y Lead. Note this is not the power to run the servo motor but the signal which tells the servo where to go, this signal comes out of the decoder chip in the receiver and is very low power so wouldn't cause any issues with the power feed to the Rx. Although we did have an issue one time with a servo that worked fine on a Rx battery but overloaded the ESC BEC, in this instance it was a faulty servo that was overloading the BEC. Interesting. What happened was that everything was OK when i switched on, then I started wiggling the sticks to test all the servos. Everything was OK for about 6 seconds, then the ailerons went nuts and ended up stuck with the arms gone past 90 deg movement. Once that started, the elevator and rudder were no longer controllable. I tried two pairs of servos, which both behaved the same, so i swapped the ESC for a better one and everything was OK. I had a similar experience before, when I knackered a good quality ESC by connecting it the wrong way for a short time. Fearing I had done it again, at first ,I tried a second ESC that was the same type as the first, but the servos behaved the same. What do you think? it's one of those £4.50 Orange DSMX receivers.

You don"t necessarily have to stick with the same brand to use all your receivers. There are multi-protocol modules now that allow your new transmitter to bind with just about any receiver. Just make sure that you get a transmitter with an external module bay so that you can install one of these modules. I don't know about other systems, but it's easy to set up the external module with an Open Tx transmitter.

I had an interesting situation the other day. The BEC on the cheap ESC wouldn't work with two servos on one channel, noteven 3.7g ones, but it was fine running two 9gservos at the same time on separate channels. Naturally, I changed itfor one that could manage it.

You can get all sorts of colours on the balance leads, so never go by them for polarity, but the connector should be correct so that when you plug it into your charger or balance board, the polarity is correct. Obviously, its worth checking with a meter if something looks suspicious.

Posted by David Mellor on 14/11/2018 19:34:45 As Pat says, use of foam wings was widespread from approximately 1963/64 onwards, as a great many popular designs on Outerzone plainly show. And almost all of them (perhaps actually all of them) are for IC engines. I don't think that fuel or heat was any sort of problem in practice, and indeed there are some interesting 1960s designs for multiple IC engined foamies. So it does look like there was a substantial proliferation of foam designs for quite some time (i.e. several decades) before cheap and plentiful small brushless motors, ESCs and lipos came on the scene. Much of this is relatively recent spin-off technology from the much bigger mobile phone industry. I think we need to differentiate between planes with foam core wings and foam planes. I built several planes with foam cores, and they always ended up heavier than built up balsa ones. Also, it was a lot more messing about. By foam planes, I'm thinking about the ones predominently made of foam.

At least when you fly the same model every week, you'd become proficient with it. I find that flying different models all the time gives you a different sort of proficiency, but it doesn't give you the accuracy that you get from knowing a single model inside out.

If you're going to use a metal box to carry, store or charge your lipos in, make sure that it's lined with an insulating material. If a battery shorted out in there and your other batteries are in there, you'd see a nice firework display.

Posted by Cuban8 on 14/11/2018 18:11:09: I'm amazed at and quite admire people that are so prolific with their building and flying. We had a chap who joined our club last year and claimed to own eighty models - I thought he was taking the mickey, until he showed us a photo of his fleet on his lawn. True, many of them were simple depron jobs, but they were all airworthy. I particularly liked the Starship Enterprise model that he demonstrated for us. My only question would be - is it possible to remain motivated to keep up interest in such a high rate of production? What do you do for an encore after the first hundred? High risk of burn-out? Excellent question. For some of us, it's a sort of curiosity that drives us. I just like to try everything, especially anything different, and cheap things have to be tried too. Once I've had a few flights with a plane, I get bored with it, though there were one or two exceptions. I guess I'm looking for a sort of model flying nirvana. I did the same with electric bikes. I must have built about 30 before I found my perfect one, which I have used nearly every day for the last 5 years. With planes, the Hots 40 stood out as the one that floated my boat. I managed to fly it regularly for about 6 months until It met its demise in a limbo competition. I keep meaning to build another one. I built one replacement, but tried to make an improved version that wasn't. I will build another one before the year is out. I remember meeting a guy at a previous club, who had flown the same plane every weekend for nearly 10 years. it was a high-wing Cessna type, and was probably the only plane he'd ever had. I watched him take off, do about 10 circuits, then land. He was very happy to do that. I remember feeling sorry for him because I was judging it from my frame of reference, not his. If that were my plane, it would be the first one in the limbo competition, and it was going to either win or get wiped out. That's if it wasn't wiped out doing the lowest knife-edge pass I could, and if it couldn't do low knife-edges very well, before the next week it would get a bigger rudder and elevator. I guess we're all different. Edited By Dave Hess on 14/11/2018 19:05:47

Most foams used in model aircraft can't deal with heat or fuel, which is most likely why foam wasn't widely used,, when IC motors were more or less your only choice, but when we had electric motors that could do the job as well as IC ones, it opened up the doors for foam planes. Edited By Dave Hess on 14/11/2018 18:34:48

Posted by Max Z on 14/11/2018 16:01:16: Posted by Dave Hess on 14/11/2018 15:13:10: I have all sorts of chargers from very cheap to very expensive, but I now use these because they're so convenient.. They're cheap, convenient, reliable and easy to use, and good for any 2S or 3S battery in the range 750mAh to 3000mAh. Take my advice and forget about the iMax type that require you to connect both the balance and power leads. It's so much messing about and they sometimes take ages to balance. These ones charge the cells individually, so no problem balancing: KIAAOSw3pZa2BMM: Edited By Dave Hess on 14/11/2018 15:14:19 800 mA to charge a 3000 mAh will take almost 4 hours to charge! I am happy with my 60W Pichler charger, I usually charge at 1C, so a full charge takes 1 hour (up to about 5000 mAh) Why would the charging time matter? Do you go flying in the morning, then rush back home so you can charge again to go back flying in the afternoon.?