Dave Hess

I see in their listing that they recommend a 94 Euro ESC. Do people really pay that for an ESC? That's more that what my planes cost even if I include the cost of the motor, ESC, servos, battery and receiver.

If you find that your running out of space, I have a suggestion: Build or buy smaller planes. Obviously, you can fit more of them in the same place. Plus, smaller ones can be all chucked on top of each other, which makes better space utilisation. There was a time when I wouldn't build anything less than 60" wingspan. My loft is full up with them, but the ones I build and buy now are nearly all less than 1000mm, and many of them a lot less. They're all fun to fly. In fact I think I'm having more fun than ever because there's less risk to my wallet if something goes wrong, and I can try more difficult things in my flying without worrying. I have something like 13 new planes in the last three months, and I have room for loads more. I could probably manage more than a hundred if I bothered to chuck the relics from my loft. I used to build approximately one plane every week, but I used to crash a lot, which kept the numbers down. I've hardly crashed since I changed to small planes and when I did crash, they've always been easy repairs. The number of planes you need is n +1, where n is the number you already have, so that's never going to work with large planes. Something will eventually give - probably the wife.

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

Most likely, you don't need to change anything other than the battery. A 4s battery will give you a 33% increase in power (approx). You have to check that your ESC is rated for 4S as many are only rated for 3S. Sometimes, it's written on the ESC, otherwise you have to loo it up in the listing. An 8x4 prop sounds way too small to me for an 1100kv motor with 3S. Is there a reason you've gone so small. I'd have thought that around 10 x 6 would be better for that motor, and I'd be using a 9x5 at 4S. If you're stuck with that size propeller, i think a 2000kV motor would be more like it with 3S and something like 1500kV with 4S. I've started doing motor thrust tests with different propellers for all my motors. I made a thrust meter. it's not properly calibrated, but it's good for comparisons. I haven't tested my 2830 yet, but my 2815 910kV does about 1.25 kg with a 4S battery and a 9 x 4.7 propeller at only 19 amps. That compares with about 900g thrust at 3S drawing 18 amps with a 10 x 4.5. With a smaller propeller, the current and power will be a lot less. Edited By Dave Hess on 13/11/2018 17:18:25 Edited By Dave Hess on 13/11/2018 17:21:00

Posted by andy pattinson on 12/11/2018 13:20:39: Latest update, Just heard from the importers and they cant determine the exact cause of the problem but are putting down to esc / motor fault and are replacing the entire thing for me in the next 7---10 days. Happy days, cant wait to get it back and flying again, maybe with one or two suggested mods this time. Great result. The only thing I'd advise is to listen to the motor before each take-off to see/hear that it's running like normal. If the noise changes enough to really notice or if it doesn't look like it's running right, probably time to get a new ESC and/or check motor connections.

Double post again. Edited By Dave Hess on 12/11/2018 22:01:55

Posted by alex nicol on 12/11/2018 15:24:12: What matters is how do the foamie flying newbies feel about the encouragement, advice and training they've received at club level and what can we all do to enhance it......... now there's a topic for discussion That's a very important point, except for one thing that worries me. If I were a newb thinking about flying RC, the last thing I'd do is look up where the nearest club is. I've never seen that happen at my present club, nor the previous one, though it often happened at my first club, which was in the pre-internet age. I'm not saying that it doesn't happen though. I'd like to bet that many newbs or potential newbs jump on to Google and find their way to this forum, then read through loads of posts before ever thinking about asking any questions. Maybe what they read makes them think that they're in the wrong place, so they check out other places that Google sends them to. Whatever, there must be some reason that they're staying away from here.

Here's my latest. It's the second plane I built this week, so I'll have two to maiden at my next visit to the flying field on Friday. This one has a thrust of over 1kg and weighs only 400g, so it should go pretty well. Slight modifications to the original plan are added ailerons, increased size elevator and rudder, reduced dihedral and a pod underneath to protect the battery that's normally fitted externally. All it took was one £2 board of foam, a £3 motor, £4.50 receiver. £4 ESC, 4 x£4 9g servos, £10 300mAh 3S lipo and an evening's work. It has to be the cheapest plane I ever made at £40 all-up if you count the cost of the hot-melt glue that holds it together. It's called the FT Flyer and, as you can see, it's based on the BMFA Dart that's used a lot in schools,

Instead of analysing the words and putting the content through the judgement by peers test, try and look for the message. I can maybe make it a bit clearer by asking a single question: Where are all the newcomers on this forum? See if you can count how many people that are new to the hobby have joined and stayed during the last 3 or 6 months. Other RC forums get several newbs a day, and many of them stay. Without newcomers what we have here will fizzle out. Regarding the unfriendliness, there's no single event, it's just the general negativeness and cliquiness that jumps out at me. I currently post on around 20 different forums and I've used maybe 100 in the last few years, so I have a lot of experience in what goes on. With that experience, I can tell you that there's definitely something wrong here. It's not just me. I mentioned my thoughts down at my local; club. Many of them said that they thought the same, which is why they don't use it. Maybe try the same at your clubs if you think I'm wrong.

The problem here is that you're not allowed to express your own opinion. As soon as you say anything outside the party line, you get personal attacks and threats of bans. Not everybody is a diplomat. What's happened is that the free-thinking engineers who have trouble expressing what they mean in a diplomatic way get jumped on and made to feel uncomfortable, so they migrate to other forums, where they enjoy the company of guys that think and write like themselves. That would leave behind all the biggots, luddites and dinasaurs, who all think and write the same. You only have to look through the list of threads to see how much discussion there is about new stuff. The greater proportion of threads are about building planes that have been around for donkeys years. If a newb comes on here asking how to get started, he gets told to buld a plane from the'50s. If this is to be the forum for old and large balsa models only, you should change the name accordingly, but I thought RCM&E was tring to cover all aspects of model flying. Further to what I wrote in para 1, this is the most unfriendly forum, I've been on. I post regularly on many forums, and have been doing so for many years - something like 35,000 posts in the last ten years, which is roughly 10 posts a day. I'd say that this is definitely the worst by a reasonable margin. You can ask me too to migrate to another forum if you want. It won't help you though to cut off messages that you don't want to hear. So, back on topic. Foam planes are here to stay. They'll secure the future of the hobby. They should be encouraged rather than ridiculed. They're the perfect planes for newbs - wind or no wind. It doesn't matter that the newbs don't know how to trim them. In most cases they fly perfectly straight out of the box. First, we need to encourage them to get into the air and start enjoying the hobby. The rest will come later. Edited By Dave Hess on 12/11/2018 12:17:03 Edited By Dave Hess on 12/11/2018 12:20:00

The tops and bottoms of the struts have slots, which is what you can see under the screw in that photo. There's an angle piece screwed to the wing that provides a tab to fix the strut to. You can just make it out if you look at the bottom edge of the strut in the photo. The one in the photo appears to be painted white. you can also see it through the slot, but it's not easy to see in the photo unless you know how it is. The screw that you can see is permanently fixed to the angle piece, though you can screw it right out if you want. It has a grommet on it to provide a bit of shock absorption and to grip on the strut. The procedure for removing the wings is to loosen the screws and slide out the struts. Edited By Dave Hess on 12/11/2018 01:04:32

It's nothing to do with the simulator. Realflight will do the same. It's your settings that you need to look at - either your PC or within Phoenix. I'm using my old gaming PC with a GTX 750 card, and It runs it perfectly. What sort of mjnitor do you have and which graphics card? Did you try sliding down the quality slider like I suggested? Edited By Dave Hess on 11/11/2018 12:28:48

The correct term for them is struts. IIRC, the kit had plywood ones that were splayed out (sort of bell-shape) at the ends.   I don't see why aluminium tube shouldn't work. The only thing is that aluminium suffers metal fatigue, so the ends might break off after some use. You'll be OK as long as you keep checking for cracks. Edited By Dave Hess on 10/11/2018 19:27:35

The problem with the safety is that most rules are to cover the worst case scenario. They're fine for some of the projectiles I've seen people throwing around the sky with crowds around, but don't really apply to a guy on his own flying a three ounce slow-fly at his local club. Some clubs have rules that you can't fly on your own, period.. It would be too complicated to make rules to cover every scenario, so what's needed is a bit of interpretation, but that requires experience, judgement and intelligence. Here's an example of what I mean from when I was a schoolteacher. I wasn't allowed to use one of those 18" high two-step ladders to get stuff of the shelf because I didn't have a ladder training certificate in my personnel folder, even though I had had ladder training in various previous jobs. Any training, of course, would train me not to use a ladder unless I had someone holding it.. I was, however, allowed to use a chair to stand on to get stuff off the shelf because it wasn't a ladder,.and I didn't need anybody to hold it. Edited By Dave Hess on 10/11/2018 14:21:06

Posted by SIMON CRAGG on 10/11/2018 13:37:20: Denis, tried all the above but its still a jerky / glithcy thing! Computer has more than enough spare capacity etc. I notice that the resolution cannot be changed?. I'll probably stick with it, as RF is a bit expensive. Most likely, your graphics card (if you have one) isn't up to the job. A decent one will allow you to run in the best quality without jerkiness. You can improve your situation by adjusting the slider under Program setup/System/display. Slide it to the left until you get smooth movement.

I used to train the newbs to fly in a very large club. They brought along all sorts of overweight and twisted aircraft with massive gaps in the control surfaces. The last thing We wanted was to discourage them by sending them home without seeing their plane in the air, so, as a general rule, if we could get the G-spot near enough, the engine pulled hard enough and the control surfaces moved in the right direction, they were going to see their plane fly, even if they weren't going to get a go themselves. I can only remember one plane that had a fault so bad that (G-spot IIRC) that I had to send him away with a plan on how to fix it. I can remember one plane that turned to the left so much that I couldn't fly it straight with full right plus full right trim, so I had to fly it in left circles to get it back to the strip. In most cases, a moderate amount of trimming and arm adjustment got the planes flying well enough to be able to give the owner a shot. In the time I trained these guys, we never lost a plane. Beginners have virtually no chance of figuring out how to trim a plane on their own. They can probably figure out to give a few clicks of up if the plane keeps going down, etc, but that's about it, bearing in mind that most of the time they'll be panicking enough to try and keep their plane in the air. You only get a feel for trim when you've flown loads of different planes in a variety of circumstances. I started with free-flight planes, so I had a good handle on trimming before I got anywhere near my first RC plane. I can remember hurling my Mini Super (1st RC plane) forward over the long grass without the engine running and without any transmitter input to check that it was properly trimmed before I ever fired it up. That's because I had been doing that with all my planes for many years. I think that if I were going to a F3A competition, I might think about precise trimming with gauges and tests, but for normal club flying, as long as it flies more or less level when you let go of the sticks, you can compensate for everything else in the way you move the sticks. In summary, if we're talking about beginners, the aim should to be to encourage them, to inform them and to help them make progress. First get their plane flying, then improve it where you can. I've been in a club where the emphasis was on preventing anybody flying unless their plane was perfect. I even had one of mine refused because the guy (safety officer) deemed my G-spot to be too far back, even though I'd been flying it for months when he wasn't there.

As Einstein said, you can't solve the problem with the thinking that was used to create it.

Posted by Ikura on 09/11/2018 11:11:10: I think you are missing something Dave. What works in America doesn't often work here. The Bristish are more reserved and prefer to do things in a more careful and controlled manner with individual tuition, hopefully leading them to gain an A certificate. Mass foam board toy launches are fine if that is your thing. The OP was stating that lightweight foam beginners models are probably not the best place to start, and you propose that lightweight foam board models are a great place to start? You've sort of hit the nail on the head. It could or would work here, except that the dinasaurs of the industry and the fun prevention police are trying to force the hobby in the way you suggest. It's not the British being reserved that's holding us back. It's jobsworth luddites! The old guys in the club who train newbs to get their A and B certs force the methods that were used on themselves 30 years ago onto these newbs without ever thinking that there might be different ways. You can see this right here on this forum. RC flying is more accessible than it's ever been. The last thing we should do is restrict it with paradymes from the '70s and '80s. Yes, I am suggesting lightweight foam planes are a good place to start. They fly better, are generally more robust and they're easier to repair. Beginners don't like to fly when windy period. It's nothing to do with what their planes are made of. Of course if you offer them a chance to buddy-box a club hack, where there's no risk to their pockets or flying career, they'll take it. I fly lightweight foam planes myself - generally aound 1KG or less. The wind doesn't bother me one iota. If anybody else is flying, so will I. Nobody enjoys flying in gales/ heavy winds, except maybe the slope soarers.

Posted by Nigel R on 09/11/2018 09:55:00: Mass combat event, looks relevant in a thread talking about beginner planes, or not, am I missing something? Of course you're missing something. That's the whole point of why I wrote it. The larger proportion of those guys flying in that video are beginners. They're flying cheap, easy to make planes mostly made of foam board. Their planes fly pretty well, in fact in the 40 years I've been building and flying, I can say that the Flitetest planes fly as well as anything, if not better.. What you see in the video, though not obvious, is loads of people having accessible fun. If you look at the Flitetest forum, you'll see new members joining every day. How many new members do we get here? That event wasn't a national combat event. Instead, it was an event organised to get as many new flyers as possible to join in a fun day (or three) building and flying planes. The emphasis is on participation and fun. As you can see, the event was successful. Originally, they only had one event per year. Now they have several. I came back to the hobby after a bit of a break. In the UK I don’t see any events that weren't around in the 80s except maybe Indoor 3D, which might owe it's existance to foam planes.

This thread just fills me with despair. This is what it could be like. Note that they're more or less all made of foam: Edited By Dave Hess on 09/11/2018 02:01:09

Posted by paul devereux on 08/11/2018 23:50:01: Those of us who have been flying for some years have preferences for certain radio manufacturers, mine is Futaba, many prefer Spectrum, no one I know prefers the built-in radios. Hmmm! I must be an exception then. I don't have any allegiance to any brand. I have one of those Cubs with its Spektrum system and I love it The radio system in that Cub is absolutely brilliant, and I can't see how it could be improved. I also have a Taranis, but I do most of my flying with a Jumper T12. My next transmitter will most likely be a Flysky.

The ESC in my one went dodgy. It made the motor scream and lower power. I replaced it, and now everything is back to normal. Any fault in the ESC or motor connections can lead to all sorts of consequential damage. I agree with KT that whatever the original problem was, the consequence was that your ESC got damaged so that it couldn't provide the 5v for the receiver.

You can change everything with your plane under model/edit. It's good fun to see how far back you can move the C of G. Also, if you double the RPM of the propeller, you can convert any plane into one that flies 3D. If you go to the Flitetest forum, you can find Phoenix models of most of their planes that you can import, then you can try them out before building them. The Sportster is extremely similar to how it flies in real life, though the one you download has been modified. You have to move the C og G back to the correct position and the propeller RPM to 12000 to get it to fly like the real one. That plane is really nice to fly on the simulator and in real life. You can build one in a few evenings.

You don't need to buy fake Spektrum receivers from Ebay when you can buy genuine Orange DSMX ones from Hobbyking for £4.50.