irwin@uiucdcs.UUCP (11/02/84)
Anyone out there fly RC helicopters? In our club of about 80 members, we have 4 that fly machines. I have accumulated several over the past few years, my favorite is the Graupner 212 and the Schluter Heli-Boy. I actually learned on a Schluter Cobra in 1973. That was a big machine, no collective pitch and took a little time (6 months) to master. I have had my share of disasters with it, but still have it and still fire it up on occasion just for kicks. The response is so slow on it, that it is not really fun to fly after having time on the more modern machines with collective pitch. I live in Illinois, but once went on vacation to Denver and took along a machine. I flew it at the site of one of the Denver clubs, and found that the mile altitude at ground level had a profound effect on the abilities of the machine and I had to re-adjust everything to make it fly very well at that altitude. Living at that location has it's draw-backs when it comes to flying RC. I also have various fixed wing planes, and have done glider towing with one of them, pulling a home designed glider built by one of the other members in our club. That is really a challenge and is a lot of fun. Our club is an active club, and we have two blacktop runways on a site built on an old land fill. It took about three years to get the place looking like anything, but now we have a real nice site and are going to put in an RC car track in the spring. There is not one in our locality and there are several kids that mess with the cars. We thought we would help them get off the streets and out of the parking lots by doing this. When at that age, funding is a problem and they can not afford such luxuries. We are only a couple of miles from the city limits, which they can get to if they find it attractive. Time will tell.
scott@opus.UUCP (Scott Wiesner) (11/07/84)
> Anyone out there fly RC helicopters? I'm interested in helicopters, but to be honest, they scare me. It seems like there's so much that can go wrong, from a mechanical standpoint. With a plane, you can pretty much assume that it will continue in the same direction as it plows itself in. I get very nervous when anyone flys his right toward our pits, and get even more nervous at the thought of an out of control upside down lawnmower. Maybe my fears are unjustified? > I live in Illinois, but once went on vacation to Denver and took along > a machine. I flew it at the site of one of the Denver clubs, and found > that the mile altitude at ground level had a profound effect on the > abilities of the machine and I had to re-adjust everything to make it > fly very well at that altitude. Living at that location has it's draw-backs > when it comes to flying RC. Yes, we definately suffer from power loss, but I can't think of anyplace I'd rather live. I've got a Great Planes Trainer 40, and at a recent club meeting, saw an ad for great planes in the Video RC Magazine. When I saw the kind of take-off's you can do at sea level with that plane, I almost cried. The Trainer 40 is a solid plane, with lots of hard balsa, so it's HEAVY. I generally take a nice long take off run, and climb at a fairly shallow angle. (None of this 30 to 45 degree angle climb out stuff around here!) By the way, Al, in that video ad, they're talking about the stuntability of the Trainer series. They show a low altitude roll that some members of our club swear rekitted the plane. The video cut to something else before we could see what happened. Do you know anything about this? If you're not into power planes, we've got much more thermal power than most places could dream of having. Being at 5000', we heat up quickly during the day, and cool off very well at night. At the moment, we're having evening temps in the 30's and daytime temps of almost 70 at times. This makes for lots of thermal activity. I've got a friend who has had several 15 minute flights, and he's brand new to gliders and hasn't yet had to circle in a thermal. The lift is just all over. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone else who's tried glider towing. We're currently building a towplane with a 9 foot wingspan. I'll give more details if anyone's interested. (It's kind of an unusual project) -- Scott Wiesner {allegra, ucbvax, cornell}!nbires!scott