This blog is about my experiences with flying radio controlled model airplanes and the associated trappings. I will be posting about pretty much anything I do related to radio controlled model airplanes. I will most likely post any time I feel that I have something to say, and hope to post at least once a week.
Please feel free to post comments on what you like or don't like or would like to hear more about.
So, what do you do when you have a flap servo go out in your Airfield/FMS T28? This is not a regular servo but the slow rate servo.
Well, if you're a normal person, you find a source for this special servo and order/buy another one. But, if you're a cheap Dutchman like me, you fix it!
This video shows the failed servo. When I first tried to move it, it was locked completely and did not move. By the time I made this video, it freed up and appeared to be working OK, but I think you can see (even with the bad focus) that was not working smooth and was catching.
One good thing this video shows, is that the servo circuitry should still be fine. It just needs new gears.
Here is the server just after popping it loose from the wing.
Here is the servo with most of the glue removed and sitting next to the tiny Phillips screw driver tip that was needed for the tiny screws (better get your glasses prescription up to date).
You may be asking by now "How are you going to fix this broken servo?" Well, it just so happens that I have the burned up servo from my front gear door repair, and this servo looks exactly the same (see the photo below). If you read my blog post on this, you know that the a jamb caused the burned up the motor and/or circuitry. Now this "donor" servo does not have the slow circuitry, but that's not what I need. I just need the gears, and they should still be fine. The broken flap servo should only need a gear or two replaced, as the circuitry is fine.
This below, photo shows the start of the tear down of both servos.
This photo shows the broken gears removed and set aside (on the right in the middle) and the gears from the donor servo (left) already removed and installed in their place.
There was one difference between the two and that was that the case screws from the original were slightly shorter that the donor screws. The donor screws also had longer threads for a more secure bite.
Since a test fit showed that the longer screws worked just fine, I decided to use them in the repaired servo.
Below is a video of the assembled servo showing that it is now working just fine. There's that focus problem again!
In this case, this repair saved me about $15 and shipping for a replacement servo. Some times it pays to be a cheap Dutchman keep all of your old broken crap that most people would just through away.
Ya, another one down. Still more to go.
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Have you ever wondered what to do for a birthday party for an RC enthusiast? Have you ever wondered what to give an RC enthusiast? It can be tough to figure out. Especially when they are over 16. Everybody likes to have fun with their friends and family, so what better to do than have a birthday party fly-in with your family and RC enthusiast friends.
This is what Richie's wonderful wife did for him. She secretly notified all of his flying friends at Sacramento Area Parkflyers and organised a BBQ surprise at the Bilby flying area. This is a little bit of the RC Flying Fun that we had thanks to Richie and his wife.
Shaky Dave really puts Richie's birthday wing through its paces, and how!
Not just aircraft, but cars too! Squishy let's a couple of the guys try out his sic fast RC Ferrari before he smokes it's electronics.
A bunch (6?) of planes really put on a show with no collisions! These guys know their stuff when it comes to piloting these wings. I think that Dr. Bob as become one of the best and as far as I know he has only been at it with the wings since last summer.
Time to leave and everyone wants to get a last flight in. Stu gets the walk of shame twice! Ouch. I had to point this out since he called me on a failed take off and had to walk out to fix it. There's no film of my fail cause, well, too difficult to film myself. Richie is rightly proud of one of his new wings and touts its durability. Supposed to be one last quick flight, yeah right! Things wind down with Dr. Bob and Shaky Dave comparing motors.
As you can see, if you have the need to throw a birthday party or any sort of event for an RC enthusiast, then get a bunch of their RC flying buddies together at a good flying field with good food (preferably BBQ) and let the fun begin.
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Now, before you get a little upset that I may be being rude about my friends, let me make it clear that I mean my Sacrament Area Parkflyer buds. You can check us out and get some more information about where we commune and fly at this site parkflysac.com.
I went out to my favorite flying area to have some RC flying fun (I like the Bilby site because it's the closest to me) and hit a snag. I was in such a hurry to get out there that I forgot the wing spar for the one airplane I brought! Since I could not fly, I decided to video those that were out there and record the fun and commerrodery. The video isn't great because all I had with me was my cell phone, but I think you will enjoy them anyway.
In this video a nice 4 stroke 3D plane has problems with stalling before take off as a nice foam jet comes in for a landing. While waiting for the 3D plane to take off, Dr Bob gets ready and tosses up an insanely speedy little wing of his and puts it through its paces.
In this video the 3D 4 stroke comes in for a nice landing while Richie is getting ready to take off his big wing with landing gear. It's a big heavy wing so he gives himself a lot of run way. Those of us parked at then end are grateful for the courtesy. Surprisingly it takes off quickly. It wobbles around quite a bit but Richie soon takes control and flies it quite nicely. Then someone gets ready to maiden their Apprentice but is troubled with steering issues.
In this video, a really cool foam jet takes of. This is the same foam jet that landed in a previous video. No, this video is not out of order, this is another flight. It took some distance to take off and from my angle, it almost looked like it was going to end up in the back of my Jeep.
This next video starts with a really nice flyby from the foam jet that took off in the last video. Just after if flew by, Richie landed his big wing with landing gear. Unfortunately he came down a little heavy and collapsed the nose wheel. We take a closer look while the foam jet makes some sweet flybys. After a few more low and casual passes he comes in for a nice landing.
Dr Bob takes out another screamer. Too bad about 3/4 of the way through while going vertical, the motor screws come loose and the prop catches the right side of the prop slot. You can hear this in the video. The result is that the torque causes the motor to spin and rip all of the motor wires out! Despite this, Dr Bob deftly brings in this wing with a nice glide and drops it right at his feet.
Quite often we have someone maiddening their new plane. That is the case with this beautiful new WW2 biplane. Unlike the Apprentice earlier, this one actually gets a chance and flight. Let's see what happens.
Yeah, OK, I don't know what happened, but needles to say, it didn't last too long. He'll get a lot of help and make another attempt soon.
We have a lot of fun out here and also at the other sites around the Sacramento area. Come out and join us, the more the merrier. There are no fees or dues, we just ask that everyone fly and behave respectfully and also take care of the areas we fly at.
Hope to see you out there!
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I really wanted to put my test equipment to use and I needed to check out my Airfield T28 with possible BEC/receiver/servo issues. So I put it all together in this one big post.
This was a complicated subject with all the test equipment and airplane gear so I decided to try my hand at a video post. So, here goes.
Thank you for watching my video post, let me know how you like this format.
Update to the video:
Further inspection showed that the faulty servo was not the steering servo but the door servo. In the following photo you can see the bottom servo is the same servo that was over heating in the video. You can also see that the push rod from the servo is flexed a lot. This is obviously putting a lot of stress on the servo and is most likely the cause of the current draw. Something will have to be done about this during the repair.
Stressed servo that failed
I have noticed that the current generation of the Airfield/FMS 1400mm Trojan T28 do not use a servo for these doors but instead uses spring linkage. I may go this route for this repair and cut one servo from my count.
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This post will be a double post as this post will serve both my Wild Hawk blog and RC Flying Fun blog. How you ask? Well, I found a new place to fly and I flew my Wild Hawk for my first outing at this location. This is also the first time flying for me in several months. Wow, a person can sure get rusty! This new location is on a road stub near an abandoned mall construction site. This road stub is off of the main road and across from the abandoned mall. It is also surrounded by farm land used for growing hay. There is a small group of flyers that get together each Sunday at this location. One of the best features of this location is that it is only about ten minutes from my house.
why did I pick a place like this instead of a formal club with a real runway and amenities. Well, I already joined the AMA (I recommend this membership for everyone in this hobby) and money is really tight right now (you folks with kids in college know what I'm talking about). So funding my hobby and paying club dues and AMA dues is out of the question. This site fits my budget and still gives me a good group to associate with.
Any way, here are some photos of this location including pictures of my Wild Hawk airplane getting ready to fly.
I did have an accident and crashed hard after failing on an outside loop.
It looked bad but I was up and flying again after some minor repairs and a battery swap.
I flew all three of my batteries this day. The only unfortunate thing was that on this day there were no other flyers that showed up. I had a good time anyway and could fly and land anywhere I pleased.
Before publishing this post I got a chance to fly again and made a video from one of my flights. Enjoy this areal look around.
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So, it's my birthday (well a few days ago) and it was a big one, and my wife, the understanding and sweet wife she is, said that I should order the RC airplane I've been wanting for some time! Now I've been pining for one of these since I first saw one over a year ago. The plane I saw was a T28 Trojan (Parkzone). I just loved the look and size of that plane. And now, my wife was telling me to go buy one! Woo whoo!
On Sunday, I started reviewing all of my options for a T28. First off I have to say that I was not interested in the small versions (800mm). I wanted a big one! After reviewing the Durafly (1100mm and retracts), Parkzone (1120mm), Dynam (1270mm and retracts), and Airfield (1400mm and retracts) models, I chose the big one, the Airfield, from Nitro planes. Now it was by far the most expensive (about $280 including shipping), but aside from being the biggest, it had the coolest features. These include lights, sequenced landing gear and doors, flaps, cowl flaps, and a 2.4GHz 6 channel transmitter!
Now I'm really excitted!
Was hoping there would be a big
picture of it on the box. Oh well.
On Monday, I signed up for an account and ordered my birthday present. By the end of the day, my order was processed and ready for shipping. By Wednesday, it was on my doorstep! Granted it only had to go from LA to Sacramento (both in California), but still, I only selected the base UPS ground shipping.
With the top off
All of the big parts laid out
Nice battery even if the charge cable
is a little short.
Now I did order the RTF version (mostly because they were back ordered on the ARF), but it is anything but RTF. After about 2 hours I had it together with the glue drying (rudder and elevator need to be glued together) and all of the servo connection hooked up. I guess the RTF part is that I had everything to fly, including the battery and radio. I only needed to assemble it and charge the battery. This thing is a monster!
The beast, all put together.
Now I'm all ready to fly and waiting for good weather.
Soon I'll have an update on how it flies and hopefully not one on how it crashes.
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I don’t know how many of you know this, but I’m a cheap penny pinching Dutchman. I’m always looking for the cheapest way to do something. I’ll spend $25 dollars in gas driving around to find something $20 cheaper! This doesn't exactly fit with my passion for technology or invention as both usually mean spending money. Why am I letting you know this? Well I’m back into this whole radio control flying thing and I got really excited about the prospect of taking video from the plane. I’ve done the video thing of the plane in flight (I even took some video of my plane while I was flying when I couldn’t get someone to come along) and that’s good and all and I won’t stop doing this, but I would really like to add video from the plane.
I started looking into the options available. I could go with a standard video camera but they are way too big for the size of planes I am currently flying. Also most of these still use some sort of media to deal with (disk or tape). Digital cameras can be used and most are very small now, but they are still to big and or to block shaped. The next option I looked into were specialty DVR systems. While very cool and packing a lot of features, these are way too expensive and some still require the addition of a camera. The last option I found out about was the use of a cell phone that has a camera with a video option. As I am cheap and because I have a few old cell phones laying around, this is the option that I am starting with.
Camera side of LG phone
Of all of the phones that I have available, the only one that is going to work for my needs is an LG Vu960. This is a relatively flat card deck size touch screen phone. This should allow for a fairly aerodynamic option if I can keep it flat to a surface on the plane.
Screen cover removed and connections exposed
Well of course things are not going to go well. The reasons I selected this phone is because it was the only one that I had that has all of its parts and was still working. Almost working. Turns out the touch screen was having issues and touching some parts of the screen produced no results and were dead spots. And as expected, these dead spots were over the selections for starting video recording and settings. After some searching with Google, I found out that this is not an uncommon issue with this phone and can sometimes be resolved with pealing off the glued on screen cover. This exposed the touch screen sensor connections and made the phone functional. Now if I come across an area that does not respond I just hold down on the connectors and it responds again.
Cell phone taped into position
Well I figured I was all set and I could just tape the phone to the plane. The location I selected was the bottom side of the left wing (port or starboard, I don't know). This should work well while testing and if I like this set up I can look at changing over to Velcro.
This all looked like it was going to work just fine and so it was just a matter of finding time to try everything out.
The day came when my schedule allowed some time to fly and the weather complied. I was excited to get into the air as the day was calm with some low overcast. I was hoping to get some video from the clouds! I got out to the field and hurriedly put everything together, turned on my radio and receiver, tested the controls, and tossed the plane into the air (I did not have any landing gear on this plane at this time). I had a wonderful flight and, and, got up into the clouds! I was so excited to get the plane back and look at what i had videoed!
I hurriedly got the plane down and ripped of the tape to get to the phone. I was very disappointed to find out the the video had stopped! Not only had it stopped, but only recorded 43 seconds! What's up with that. I set the phone to record to test it out. It only recorded 43 seconds again. What? Oh man, back to Google.
So what did I find out? Something simple of course! As with all phones that can record video and send them attached to text messages, they limit the video size. All I had to do was to reset this option and now I can record for as long as I have memory. While I was at this, I also made sure that the phone was set to record video directly to the SD card. This makes transferring video much easier as I don't have a USB cable for this phone and don't want to deal with Bluetooth. Oh, while I'm relating the cell phone settings, I also put the phone into, appropriately enough "airplane mode". This turns off the cell phone connection.
OK, I waited for another opportunity to fly. I got that opportunity and made a few good videos that covered the entire flight! These were fine, but the camera is facing directly down and so while most of it has interesting views of the surroundings, these videos can be quite nauseating. I need to find some way of getting a view that looks forward.
Mirror and foam pieces
So how am I going to change the view? My daughter suggested just taping it on somewhere (the cockpit) facing up but that just makes it this big flat surface pushing through the air. I figured there must be a better way of doing this. I decided to try using a mirror to get a view forward. I checkout out my local Micheal's store and found some small mirrors. Then I cut out some foam pieces that will help me to mount the mirror at an angle to the camera lens. After some testing I realized that the phone would have to sit sideways to get the wide angle view the camera was intended to have. This presented another issue in that the way I was going to set it up, would give me a video that scrolled from bottom up instead of top down. This meant resetting the mirror again.
Mirror attached
Back side of mirror and foam bracket
You can see from the included pictures that I just hot glued everything together. This works very well and make it easy to change things if needed without damaging the phone. Now all is setup and ready for testing again.
I finally had a chance to fly again and took some really fun videos of flying my plane for the first time with the landing gear installed (see my other blog My Wild Hawk Experience for more on this). Well, one final issue with this. I noticed that there was something wrong with these latest videos. The right and left are swapped such that if the plane goes left, the video shows it going right! Oh well, what can I expect for my free kludged solution.
The latest update on this story is that I gave in and ordered a video recorder from my favorite hobby site Hobby King. They have a video recorder, that looks like a car remote key fob, for less that $10! Even as cheap as I am, I can't pass this up. As usual something always goes wrong for me and this is no on back order! Oh well, Ill post again when it comes in and I get a chance to test it out.
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