Airfield T28 Trojan Maiden Flight

I have this beautiful new new Airfield T28 Trojan and I finally have a chance for it's maiden flight!

I feel that I should note here, before I go on, that I have discovered that the Airfield name is actually a re-brand by Nitro Planes of FMS products.  Not that that's a bad thing, just that FMS T28 enthusiasts are included too!

Its Easter weekend and I will be visiting my folks near that cool park and the weather is expected to be great for flying.

Look at all those wires

We start packing for our trip and I realize that this plane is huge and would not fit in the trunk of my car (Mazda 3).  It wouldn't be so bad, but this plane is not made to be taken apart like most planes.  There are four screws that bolt the wings on from underneath.  This isn't so bad except that there are a million wires that come from the wings into the fuselage!  OK, OK, there are 5 sets of wires from one wing and 6 from the other (landing gear door, landing gear, flaps, ailerons, and wing lights) and not a million.  These are routed through small openings that make dis-assembly/assembly difficult and something to be avoided at all costs!  OK, I'm being dramatic again, but this is not trivial.  As it would happen, I did end up unbolting the wings, separating them, and disconnecting all of the connections for the servos and lights to get this big plane to fit.

Wow, this really made me think that I need to take transportation into account with planes in the future, and explains why serious RC pilots have trailers.

Once we arrived (we were early for once) I unloaded the plane into my Dad's workshop and started assembly.  Of course this was not until after we greeted them, brought in our dinner contribution, gifts for recent birthdays, and visited a little.  I'm not that crazy focused on RC planes.  Now I only had to wait for the meal to be over and for all of the other guests to leave!  I have to say that I did not really want that meal to be over because my Mom made this lamb that was to die for (hm... not sure that was worded appropriately).  Any way, it was really good.

Hooking up the battery

Snapping on the cockpit

Testing the throttle

Finally everyone is gone and I still have 45 minutes before we also need to leave.  Off to the park.  We arrive at the park.  I have to thank my daughter who rode in the back seat with the airplane tail in her face (I also have to thank her for being my photographer).  There is about a 5mph breeze, but this shouldn't be an issue.  We get the plane out and I get it setup.  Wow, it sure looks good sitting out there on the dirt runway!  I tested all of the control surfaces, I tested the motor, and then I taxied the big Trojan T28 out and around the runway.  I let her sit there for a bit off to my left facing into the breeze, giving me time to collect my courage.

Ready for take off

Leaping into the sky

I gave her full throttle and hoped to keep her straight.  Half way down I could see her wanting to take flight.  I gave her a little elevator and she shot straight up into the air.  Wow, beautiful!  I struggled to level her out and bring her around as the controls are a lot touchier that I'm used to.  Watch out, this thing can really snap around!  I eased up on the throttle and  pulled in the landing gear as I made a big loop around the airfield in front of me.  I'm just now thinking that I should start working with the trim.  I go for another loop but this time decide to try turning away from myself as I'm coming across the back field.  At this point she is downwind and about 100 yards off to my right at about a 45 degrees.

It hit about 10ft back

Dad and I assessing the damage

This is where things go terribly wrong as suddenly I feel that I have no control!  I had given more power, but she is not going any faster!  I gave her up elevator, and she is not climbing!  I gave her left and right aileron and she is not banking!  The next thing I know is that my beautiful $280 Trojan T28 is headed straight for the ground!  At the last moment she started to respond the my elevator command and pulled up just enough to avoid drilling in!  Pieces flew just before that terrible WHUMP sound reached us.  Nothing left to do but start that dreaded walk over to see what was left.

Still assessing the damage

Point of impact

Small pieces everywhere but the fuselage was intact!  So, this was bad, but not as bad as I anticipated.  We collected all the parts putting them in a bag.  Took the wing apart again and loaded it up, in the trunk this time.  No need for careful placement and handling.

Next post I hope to feel well enough to review the extent of the damages and reconstruction.

Thanks for stopping by my blog.  Please feel free to post comments, good or bad, and be sure to come back and check for future posts.

Happy Birthday To Me!

So not enough candles.

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.

Thanks for stopping by my blog.  Please feel free to post comments, good or bad, and be sure to come back and check for future posts.

Using A Servo Tester

OK, so now admit it, how many times have you installed a servo and hooked up linkage, assuming that it was centered, only to find out it was not.  Come on, admit it, all of you have done this at one time.  Why have we done this?  Because we are all too lazy to hook everything up to a receiver and battery and to power on a transmitter.  That's why you need a servo tester.

This is the Turnigy servo tester that I found and purchased.











You can connect up to 3 servos and test them all at the same time.  There are three settings that are cycled through by the press of a button.  The default when powered up is the manual dial.  Press the button and it goes to center.  Another press of the button and now it cycles from one end to the other and will continue until you change the setting or run out of battery.  To power this little guy I purchased a 4x AA battery holder from Radio Shack and added a servo connector.  I have also used this device to test speed controllers and retractable landing gear.  For testing an ESC, no battery is needed if it has an included BEC.

The only draw back is that the LED is way too bright and blinding if you're not careful.

Here is a video showing this device in action.

For about $6 you just cannot go wrong with one of these and it's a must for any toolbox.

Thanks for stopping by my blog.  Please feel free to post comments, good or bad, and be sure to come back and check for future posts.

Turnigy Brushless ESC Programing

Hello all,
Recently I purchased a nice Turnigy TY-P1 25Amp HEXFET Brushless Speed Controller that was reported to be programmable through your transmitter throttle stick movements.  Well, it is programmable, but I could never get any correct documentation for this one.  It also listed this Turnigy TYP1 ESC programmer as an optional item.  In my infinite wisdom, I did not buy the programmer with the speed controller.  I finally gave in and purchased it and now wish I had from the beginning.  It's small, light, and really easy to use, and really inexpensive.

 Here are all the pieces that are needed to get the programming done. I have here a LyPo battery pack for power, along with the brushless speed controller and programmer.  The first thing is to hook up the brushless speed controller to the programmer.  The programmer has two connections noted as BATT for battery and BEC.  Since this brushless speed controller has a BEC it can be connected to the BEC input and no battery is needed on the battery connection.

Once the battery is connected to the speed controller, it lights up with the current program.

To change any of the settings, use the up and down scroll button to select the feature to be changed.



Now use the left and right scroll key to select the setting for the feature that is desired to be changed.

Once you have all the settings the way you want them, use the OK button to save the settings to the speed controller.  When you do this the light above the OK key will flash blue and then turn off when done.

I really like this programmer and it certainly is small enough to take anywhere.

I added this video of me programming my ESC.

Thanks for stopping by my blog.  Please feel free to post comments, good or bad, and be sure to come back and check for future posts.

Old Plane New Life

Hello all,

I've got an old plane that is in need of a new life.  I received this really cool RC airplane several years ago as a gift.  It was cool because it looked like a jet with a motor mounted on the rudder, and it came with a mini digital camera that was activated from the transmitter!

The biggest problem with this plane was that the control system was not proportional.  This meant that the elevator and rudder were at neutral or full up or down.  No where in between.  The motor did have three speeds, but if it's too hard to fly, the throttle speeds do not matter.  After many attempts to fly and very little success, I packed it away (I'm way too cheep to through out something like this).

Original plane and transmitter

Now I'm back into RC flying and it's time to see what can be done with this thing.  I hauled it out and started to take it apart and see what was worth keeping.  I had high hopes for some micro servos, if not a small receiver or speed controller.  As it turns out the servos were just a motor with gears so they were out.  The receiver was this awkward and large conglomeration that incorporated the speed controller.  So, nothing but foam was salvageable.

Receiver

I started by gutting the whole thing to see for sure what I had to work with and where things might go and how I might put it all back together.

Gutted plane showing compartments

All the pieces

Before I had plans for the rest of the plane, I knew that I wanted to put ailerons on it.  So that is what I started with.  I decided to do this because I will be using the old 3 channel transmitter and receiver from my Wild Hawk.  I had great success using just elevator and aileron controls on that plane and thought it would be a good idea for this one as well.

Ailerons installed and servo locations marked out

Servo location cut out

Servo dry fitting

For this build I decided that I could just cut right through the wing and install the servos there.  The close tolerance of the cut out will hold the servo from moving and then tape on either side will secure it even more.  Taping it like this will allow for easy access when needed.

View from the back side

Servo cable routing

So far so good.  Now I need to look at how to control the elevator.  The plane is too small and light to mount a servo in or even near the tail.  Plus with this plane having the motor mounted so far back, I don't want to add any more tail weight.  I decided on a location under the wing and made a cut out for the servo.  This time instead of actually cutting the foam out, I melted the foam with a solder iron until I had the shape I wanted.  Doing it this way gave me a rigid compartment for the servo.

Original servo in place

New servo.  Fits perfect

At this time I also ran two bamboo skewers down the middle of the fuselage to give it more rigidity.  I used my solder iron to channel out any places that needed it to make room for the skewers.  I used hot glue to hold the skewers in and they made a big difference.

Both aileron servos in place

After getting the servos and re-enforcement in place, I think I'm ready for assembly.

All pieces ready to put together

I think it looks good!  You can see that I soldered the speed controller connection along the outside of the fuselage to the motor.  I was going to try to route them inside, but that was going to be too much trouble and this will work fine.

All together from the top side

This is the underside where you can see that after I inserted the speed controller and receiver, I just taped over the opening to hold it all in.  The battery is installed in the compartment under the front wheel.  There is also an on/off switch located there that I re-used.  It's really small but works fine.

From the bottom side

Now its time to align the servo arms, control linkage, and control horns.  I don't have my servo tester yet and did not use the radio to center the servos.  I just assumed that they were centered and installed the servo arms where they needed to be.  Then hooked up the push rods and connected to the aileron horns.  Once this was done I fired up the radio.  Wow!  I almost ripped of the left aileron!  That will teach me to assume and not check everything before I just put it together.

Miss aligned servo almost rips aileron off

Now everything is together the way I intended and everything has been tested.

Ailerons aligned properly

Everything is ready for a test flight and as usual, I'll have to wait for an the alignment of the stars, well, good weather and free time.

Thanks for stopping by my blog.  Please feel free to post comments, good or bad, and be sure to come back and check for future posts.

CG Finder

Hello all,

I finally decided that using my index fingers was not accurate nor useful enough any more and that I needed a better method to find the CG on my planes.  I checked out commercial CG finders with lots of cool options, but being the cheep Dutchman I am, I decided I could just make my own.  So, the following is the process I went through to make a CG finder.

CG finder pieces

I started by looking for a suitable stand.  I had seen others use a 2x4, but I did not want something that size.  I looked in my scrap wood bin (what do you mean you don't have a scrap wood bin?) and found a piece of primed trim about 3/4x2x12".  This seemed like it would work fine.  Then I looked for something for uprights.  Again to my scrap wood bin and I found some 1/4" wood doweling.  I cut two pieces about 10" long.  I then drilled two 1/4" holes in the base about 8" apart.  All of these measurements so far were just arbitrary and just guessing how much clearance I might need or want.  Enough rod length for fuselage body and landing gear clearance, and separation of rods for a suitable width.
 I wasn't to concerned with the size or stability of the base as it would be at, or close to, the CG or balance point and would not need much stability.

Rounded off rod tips

I did round off the ends of the rods a bit to provide for a smaller more accurate tip, but one that would not poke into foam or covered wings.

All setup

Setup it looks pretty good and works well too.  I did not glue in the rods so that I could take it apart for easier transport.  The pieces fit quite well in the upper tray of the little tool box to the right in the photo.

CG finder being used on my Wild Hawk

Using tape measure against rods

This little unit has worked quite well and for the money, you can't beat it.  Besides, it's really hard to take measurements with a ruler when the plane is balancing on your finger tips.

My conclusion, if you need a CG finder for your plane, just go out and make one!  It's real easy.

Thanks for stopping by my blog.  Please feel free to post comments, good or bad, and be sure to come back and check for future posts.

Flapperons

Hello all,

Since I now have a programmable transmitter and an airplane with ailerons in need of flaps, I decided to see what it would take to setup flapperons.  My initial installation of ailerons consisted of flaps cut into each wing with servo to operate each one and a "Y" cable to connect both servos to channel one on the receiver.  One servo was installed apposed to the first one so that they in effect move opposite of each other.  This proved to be a perfectly usable way to run ailerons and is easy to trim.  As there is no room to add flaps with another set of servos, it seemed reasonable to try setting up mixing to accomplish this.

Cutting out the Y adapter

Both connectors cut out

New aileron extensions installed

The first thing I needed to do was to cut out the "Y" cable that I had glued in.  Each of the split connectors were glued, one into a cutout in each side of the fuselage.  Once these were removed I replaced them with regular extensions.  One of these would go into channel 1 and the other would go into channel 6.  Channel 1 would then be mixed with channel 6 and channel 6 set for reverse direction.  Then switch B would be mixed with channel 1 and then again with channel 6.  Since channel 6 had been reversed for aileron control the mixing of switch B would also need to be reversed.

HK T6A V2 6 channel transmitter

As I have a Hobby King T6A V2 2.4GHz 6 Channel transmitter, this required the use of the T6Config software.  Now I have to say that this isn't the greatest software but it is functional.  The first time I used it, it worked just fine and I was able to reverse my elevator servo and play with a few other settings.  Well, that was some time ago and I have not needed it since.  This time when I started up the software I was unable to get the software to work with the programming cable.  Each time I selected the com port (4 in this case, oh, and even though this is a USB cable, it appears as a serial connection) the software would freeze up.  I suspect this is due to software updates that have broken the old driver.  It took a while but I was finally able to find the link to the USB cable site and download the latest driver.  With this new driver all was working fine again.

On to the software settings.  The following show the actual settings used to accomplish the mixing that I  mentioned above.

Mix 1 causing channel 6 to follow channel 1

Mix 2 adding channel 1 to switch B

Mix 3 adding channel 6 to switch B 

There are others who have rate settings for mix 2 and 3 set as low as 10 and as high as 75.  I thought I would use 50% so as  to give more room for experimenting.  In this case, 50% gives 50% down when applied and still leaves another 50% of down for ailerons.  Note also that mix 3 is -50% as this servo is reversed for aileron control.  Also note that with this particular transmitter, as the dials are associated with the switches, VR B will also affect the amount of flaps (adjust how much of the 50% is applied).  Just as a side note, my channel 5 is switch A, and I left that setup as a throttle cut off.  This is a whole other story as to how well that works with a stick programmable brushless speed controller.

In testing, all of this worked as planned!  Unbelievable that it worked on the first try.  This seems to never happen for me.  I am a happy camper.

Flapperon testing

So, now it's off to see how it flies!

Thanks for stopping by my blog.  Please feel free to post comments, good or bad, and be sure to come back and check for future posts.