Gloster Javelin

[Colin Leighfield]

I showed this before on my indoor page. I drew it and built it in a matter of hours using 3mm. Depron, adding just a 2mm carbon fibre tube as a wing spar underneath. 24’ span with two of Eric Strefford’s brilliant miniature EDFs, a Deltang rx with two ESCs built in and miniature longitudinal servos, all intended for indoor flying. Lipo is a 1S 300mah 70C. Indoors at Shawbury I struggled with it. It flew very well from the off but with the poor light and my ham-fistedness I struggled to see the camouflaged finish and kept hitting things. I thought I would try it outdoors and did so on the Friday evening and Saturday at MayFly. It flew really well and had a lot more presence in the air than you would ever expect from something that small weighing 58 gms with battery! There were no range issues and five plus minutes is no problem. I showed it on the BMFA Facebook page and someone asked if there was a video. I took it to Fradley on Wednesday and flew it in a 7/8 mph wind, that didn’t seem to bother it. Using my TomTom Bandit on my cycle helmet I videod it. Stupidly I made the same mistake as with the Jackdaw and recorded in slo-mo! However speed x2 on YouTube has put it about right, although voice is still affected. I hope it works on here. Chuffed to bits with this, you don’t have to spend a lot of time or money to make something interesting that turns out to be a great flyer. I will make a 16" version of it with a single one of Eric’s EDFs and paint it in the red and white finish of the last one flown at Farnborough so that I can see it in the hangar at Shawbury!

Edited By Colin Leighfield on 05/07/2019 17:24:06

[Colin Leighfield]

Once again I see that although I adjusted the speed on Youtube it has downloaded here at the reduced speed. My apologies, I must do better.

[cymaz]

Impressive Colin....even at 24’ !

[Colin Leighfield]

Good one Cymaz! Actually I might have enough Depron in stock to make a 24’ version! Might need to go up to 6mm thick though. Must ask Eric how many EDFs I will need.

[Simon Chaddock]

Colin

That is very impressive - and even more so at half speed!

How much does it weight?

[Colin Leighfield]

Hi Simon. With the battery, 58gms.

[Foxfan]

It so much better flying slowly. One reason nothing much appears very scale like is the hyper speed they all fly at. I think we should all try to make our aircraft fly more slowly, whilst keeping safe control obviously. Possibly deltas are the answer to start with? And boy, I love a delta!

Martin

[Colin Leighfield]

Hi Foxfan. Fair comment. During this flight I just left the throttle wide open, so it could have been slower. Even with that I get good flight duration, the landing here wasn’t due to a flat battery, I just chose to bring it in. With moderation on the throttle it might give 10 minutes. I have to say the Javelin delta layout with tailplane is a joy, it just flies so well. When I drew it up I put minus three degrees negative incidence on the tailplane, thinking that if I did that I probably wouldn’t need any reflex on the elevons. It actually needs just a touch, say three mm, so on the next one I will use minus four. Not that it matters, as you can see it flies really well anyway.

[Simon Chaddock]

I am a long advocate of 'visual' scale speed. i.e. the time for a plane to travel its own length.

Even Concorde did not go much above 300 knots at an airshow (the equivalent of RC flying?) and the Vulcan significantly less..

[Colin Leighfield]

Can’t argue with that Simon. I guess that at a fifties airshow the Javelin would probably be displaying in the range of 250/500 mph at different stages. This is 1/26 scale, 10/20 mph would be about right, and it’s probably not far off that. It looks faster on the video than it does when you are flying it, I don’t quite know why.