John Ranson Beaufighter

[Chris Freeman 3]

A while ago I bought a Beaufighter from a very well known Jet Modeller who had built the model to fly in scale events in South Africa as he had stopped flying jets and needed to keep active. On the 9th flight it crashed due to one of the brushless motors stopping! The airframe was given to another modeller who repaired it and flew it a number of times but was now moving to a smaller house and did not have space for it so he gave it back to Mark the original builder. Mark did not want to spend the time to get the airframe back to the standard he wanted so he put the airframe up for sale. Mark is in Durban and I am in Johannesburg which is over 500km away so I paid the money and Byron collected the airframe when he went on holiday to Durban a few weeks later.

 

When I received the airframe I had to spend time trying to figure out what is needed to get the aircraft flying as this will determine how much time I can afford to spend on it as some improvements can be made. Mark did a great job in the original construction with lots of nice detail but it is now quite a complex and heavy model. Lots of servos, leads and multi boxes are in the airframe along with a nice set of electric retracts. I am slowly getting things done and am making sure that I have a good understanding of the set up.

 

This is one project I have always wanted to build since the original article in one of the Traplet magazines many years ago and I even have a set of plans that Tony Stephenson gave me on one of his trips to this country.    

[stu knowles]

Lovely model.  Doesn't appear to be much damage.

 

[Adrian Smith 1]

Nice piece of kit there,Chris 

[Chris Freeman 3]

Been a while since we tried to fly the Beaufighter, I used the motors from the DC3 so I was not 100% sure that they had not been damaged. I had used 1 of the ESC's so I had to buy another. The ESC leads were short so it was quite hard to do all the motor checks but it all seemed fine. Byron and I went to the field and set it up and did all the checks. The take off had a pronounced swing to the right and Byron needed lots of left trim once airborne, the was struggling so we left the wheels down as the CG would move back it retracted. He did a few circuits and settled down a bit. Soon it was time to land and to our surprise and relief it was a good one.

On the way home Byron said it was almost as it it had asymmetric thrust. I was not sure if it was a motor that was damaged. 

 

I let the Beaufighter sit on the naughty bench for a while and then started to do some checks to see what was wrong. I had another motor the same size so I replaced the left motor. I then took it outside to do some checks and found the left motor was down 200 watts compared to the right motor. Must be the ESC but this was the new one. I decided to try and reset it by powering up the ESC with full throttle  I GOT the beeps and when throttling back it armed. When checking the watts it matched the 1100 watts of the right motor. So this was a set up error!

 

The next attempt at the field went much better and Byron was quite impressed on the available power a the flying characteristics. We still need to have more flights in better weather conditions to see how well it goes and then to decide if we want to do some more work on it as it has had a hard life. 

[Cuban8]

Those switches with the charging ports on the underside...............if they're the inexpensive type available from all over the place and under different names, I hope they're not feeding anything critical - the couple I had were of terrible quality and although seeming to work OK, were far from making a reliable connection when switched on. Worth checking closely that they dont go open when just a slight pressure is applied to the operating slide when in the on position as mine were prone to.

Discussed this at length elsewere re RX switches.

Edited October 22, 2024 by Cuban8

[Chris Freeman 3]

Thanks, I am a bit paranoid when it comes to switches as I lost a Giant Stinger that I scratch built on its test flight when a switch failed. Buried the 45cc ST in hard ground and destroyed the airframe. These switches seem to be a good quality. I also look at the wire and the connectors to see the quality. Silver wire with few strands and silver connectors are often a indicator of cheap quality. I tend to use 2 switches in higher vibration airframes. As this is electric, 1 switch is for the retracts and 1 for the radio.