Announcer: We’ll be right back. Now, here are your hosts, Ron and Tom.

Ron: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the RC Plane Lab podcast. I’m Ron. And I’m Tom. Today, we’re going to be talking about transmitters. But before we get to that, Tommy, have you done any work since last we spoke on anything?

Tom: Yeah, a little bit.

Ron: Is that all?

Tom: I covered the rudder.

Ron: Okay, well, you did get something done. Good for you.

Tom: I was hoping you weren’t going to bring that up.

Ron: Yeah, I got the rudder done.

Tom: It’s all covered. I’m almost ready to start installing everything back in the airplane.

Ron: Yeah, well, I’ve got to say, it’s looking really good with the decals you have cut. The iron crosses turned out really great. Thanks.

Tom: Had a good buddy that cut those for me. Yeah, he must be pretty handy with the vinyl cutting machine.

Ron: No, it’s fun doing that kind of stuff for airplanes. I enjoy the decal work and all that stuff. I think it’s fun.

Tom: And they really do look good. For those of you that don’t know, but it’s an old stick airplane that Ron cut the iron crosses for me. And we actually decided that we liked the outline on the old iron cross instead of just being a black cross. It’s a black cross with a black outline.

Ron: Looks really good. Yeah, it gives a little depth. I like it.

Tom: Unusual colors, too, that I chose for this airplane. Not the usual red and white stick. It’s something a little different.

Ron: Yellow and transparent orange. Yeah. Which, transparent orange does nothing for me, but it’s the transparency in general. I get it. I don’t like to see the wood or the scar. No, it’s not. And that’s why it’s your plane, not mine. Exactly. So, since last we spoke, I did get a new-to-me airplane. Nice. It’s a Great Plains Twin Star. So, dual electric motor.

Tom: Oh, the electric version.

Ron: Yeah. Okay.

Tom: Okay, I got you.

Ron: So, I took it out, actually, a couple days ago, after I got it bound up to my transmitter and stuff and maidened it, if you will. Like I said, new-to-me plane. Oh, that was scary. I actually thought I was going to lose it a couple times.

Tom: Do tell.

Ron: It was very off. Like, I did all the checks, the pre-flight checks and stuff, before I took it out there. You know, I made sure everything was on. I made sure the propellers were balanced, made sure the gear was tight, made sure all the connections were good. But there was just something off when I was flying it. It’s a faster plane than I prefer. I expected it would be a decent slow flyer, but there is nothing- Not so. Not so. No, it takes a lot of speed. But it also, so when I took off, and I had all the control surfaces even. Zeroed. Zeroed, yeah. When I took off, you had to completely, or you had to hold aileron almost full right in order to make it fly without rolling left. And it was just climbing like crazy. I almost had to do full elevator down to keep it from climbing.

Tom: How to do when you pull the throttle back.

Ron: Once I went down to about a quarter throttle or a little below, it kind of evened itself out, but the problem became I was going a little bit too slow, and I stalled it. Oops. And luckily, I was high enough to where I had time to recover. But when it stalled, it just went into a spin and did not want to come out. Oh, dear. So, yeah, it was a hairy situation. It was probably one of the worst maidens I have ever done on an airplane.

Tom: Well, it’s still in one piece. It is.

Ron: Oh, yeah. Did you figure out what was wrong with it? It took a lot of, like I said, a lot of trim. But I think I want to go in and just re-zero everything again, make sure the throws are right, and make sure everything’s set up to how it’s supposed to be set up from the factory. Apparently, it had been flown before. So, it, I don’t know. It was a little bit hairy. But the guy got it from before, actually. He had never flown it. He bought it from a swap meet. Uh-huh. Yeah. He tried to get it bound up to his transmitter, and let’s just say he had an accident with it, with the throttle and all that. He, uh…

Tom: So, he used one ESC or two? Two. Two, okay.

Ron: Yeah, two. But anyway, so when he was getting it ready and doing his checks to make sure everything worked right, he, let’s just say, flew it into his leg. He, yeah, apparently he cut his pants and hurt himself a little bit. We laugh, but it’s really not funny. Just be careful when you’re working with these things. They’re, while they are toys, they’re dangerous toys. So, yeah. Yeah, so he wanted to get rid of it because, you know. Sure, scared him. Bad juju. Mm-hmm. So, that’s all the better for me. Right. But it did not fly all that great, so maybe it is haunted. Who knows? But, no, we’ll get it. We’ll get it taken care of.

Tom: We’ll check the CG, and, you know, we’ll check the lateral balance as well. Yeah. You know, see if it balances, you know.

Ron: CG was fine. You know, I mean, I did check that before I flew it. Where’d you find the manual and get the CG out of the manual? Okay. Yeah. It tells where it’s supposed to be on that plane, and I checked it, and it was okay. Anyway, the only thing he said, too, was, so when he did that, he broke the nacelle that was on it. Right. And I don’t think he realized when he also did that, he unglued it from the wing. So, when I first got it together and I was doing my test, you know, here at home before I was going to fly it, something just was off. Right. It didn’t sound right. It didn’t feel right. It just, it was off a little bit, so I took it apart, and I did find that that had come

Tom: unglued.

Ron: Yeah, that’s not good. Yeah. Got that all glued back together, and then I still need to get a nose comb for it, because apparently he said he knelt on it when he was getting up and cracked that. But, no, hopefully it’ll be a good airplane here after we do some more checks on it. That’s a good-looking airplane.

Tom: Yeah.

Ron: I like the looks of it, but I’d rather be able to fly it and enjoy it more.

Tom: Yeah, we’ll figure it out. Yep. It shouldn’t take much.

Ron: No, I don’t think it will. But, other than that, I haven’t had much time since last episode to do anything, so. Yeah.

Tom: Cool. So, we’re talking about transmitters today. Yeah.

Ron: Let’s get into it.

Tom: Yeah.

Ron: So, we’ll start with what we’ve got in front of us here.

Tom: We have a DX8, which is Ron’s transmitter. I also fly with a DX8. A bit old school these days, but when they first came out, they were the bee’s knees, if I can say that.

Ron: They’re still good transmitters. Yeah. They do what they need to do.

Tom: Well, it does everything I want.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: The only thing about the DX8 that could potentially be a problem down the road is the number of channels. Right. And we’ll talk about that. So, setting up a transmitter, I’ll just dive right into it.

Ron: Sure. This is, for everybody listening, this might be, what’s what I’m looking for, kind of boring if you’re not too sure of what you’re listening to. But I think this is important to cover because it is, while it is technical, it’s important to know how to set things up right and how to, well, what you’re looking for when you’re trying to buy something even. Right. You know, it’s good to know what the transmitters will do and what you can expect out of them.

Tom: And I don’t know about you, but I’ve bought things before and they were more capable than

Ron: than I was capable, if that makes sense.

Tom: Oh, yeah. For instance, a transmitter, these things have lots of settings that you can adjust and customizations and menus and things like that. And if you don’t know what some of this stuff means, it could be a bit overwhelming, especially when you turn the thing on and you just want to go fly.

Ron: Right.

Tom: So, we thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to sort of just go over some of the basics and maybe talk about what each function does and maybe what sort of airplane would use that kind of function.

Ron: Yeah, and it’s also good to know, too, because if you have something that you want to do or need to do, but don’t know what that’s called or where to find it, you know, this should hopefully help you figure out what settings you’re looking for and where to start. Exactly. So, okay, let’s get into it. And this is all going to be you. So, talk to me.

Tom: Well, I’ll try. I’ll do my best. And correct me if I get anything wrong. So, predominantly today, it’s 2.4 gigahertz. So, the different types of transmitters, they’re all kind of, the modern ones are using that sort of technology, which I believe comes from wireless, not cell phones, but like the wireless phones we used to use in our homes.

Ron: Yeah. So, it was the same frequency. So, the 2.4 gigahertz is what we used.

Tom: Right. So, most modern transmitters today are going to be on 2.4 gigahertz.

Ron: Yeah. But for you, I guess, not necessarily me, because I remember it with the old RC car days, we had some AM transmitters, apparently some FM transmitters also. Yep. Because I remember you have to pick your, what you said, AM had six bands, I think. Yeah. 27 band had six available frequencies arranged by color. Right. So, you had to be sure you did not have anybody else on your frequency or else you lost control of your car, which that was before I was in the airplanes.

Tom: Right.

Ron: Cars were bad enough. So, I can’t imagine, like how many on FM, like 75 megahertz or 72?

Tom: I think it was around 40. I think we had 40 available frequencies for air use on 75 or 72, whatever megahertz that was.

Ron: And so, like I said, if you had somebody else with a transmitter on your color for cars, you had no control of your car. I shouldn’t say that. You had just as much as the other person did. Right. Was that the same for airplanes then?

Tom: Yeah. Pretty much. That’s scary. Mixing of the streams. Yep.

Ron: Yeah. So, I guess I’m glad that we have advanced past, I guess, that technology. Oh, yeah.

Tom: And have gone with 2.4 gigahertz. Oh, yeah. That’s so much better.

Ron: The radios, if I understand it correctly, actually transmit farther than the FM. Oh, yeah. Is that correct? The range is much better. The range is much higher. Oh, yeah. And you don’t have to worry about interference from other radios either. Nope. Not at all. Yeah. That’s amazing where we are now.

Tom: Well, I shouldn’t say not at all, but it’s so much better. And we don’t have the issues with stray signals affecting our airplanes and our airplanes kind of freaking out for a millisecond and then coming back to you when they get the signal again. Yeah. Those days are kind of over. Thank goodness.

Ron: Well, our local flying field still has the board up. That has the, I guess, apparently when you’re flying on.

Tom: Yeah, the frequency clips are still in there.

Ron: Yeah. So how did that work then when you were flying on a certain number, I guess? Yeah.

Tom: So it was basically clothespins with a number written on them. And the number was the frequency that you were using. And if you had the clip or if the clip was missing out of the board and you wanted to turn your transmitter on, first you went to the board to make sure your frequency was available. I.e. if there was a clip in there with a number on it, you grab that clip, stick it to your transmitter antenna. And that was your way of letting everybody know that you were on channel 86 or whatever channel it was. Wow. Yeah. So you didn’t turn your transmitter on in the pit unless you check that board. So much different these days. People just turn their transmitters on all willy nilly and. Don’t even think about it. Right.

Ron: Because it, yeah, it does not affect other airplanes unless they are bound to the, that receiver. Exactly. So, yeah, amazing technology. I’m, I’m glad it’s that way now.

Tom: Yeah, I am too.

Ron: Especially coming from the old AM days when, yeah, we weren’t, we’ll talk about that.

Tom: So, yeah, when you, when you first fire up in our example, a DX8 and setting up a new model, the first thing it’s going to ask you, the DX8 anyway, it’s going to ask you what type of model, model type. So the DX8, for those who don’t know, can do airplanes and helicopters. And then once you’ve selected the model type, in this case, we’re going to go with airplanes because that’s what we’re talking about, then you’ll have to set up the wing type. So in the DX8 and other transmitters, probably very similar. Uh, I think most of the spectrum stuff sort of uses the same, uh, menu layout flow.

Ron: Yeah. Menu layout. Thank you.

Tom: Uh, so, you know, wing type, what they’re talking about is, you know, are you using one servo to drive both ailerons or is it a, is it a bi, a biplane where you’re using maybe two servos to drive four ailerons or, or maybe an airplane where you’ve got one servo for each aileron. You can select that in the DX8 menu and that will assign those servos a channel on the receiver. So that’s what kind of what I was alluding to earlier when I said with some of today’s bigger airplanes, a DX8, you’re going to run out of channels, especially if you’re using multiple servos and not wiring up with a Y harness. Now a Y harness is basically a way to plug two servos into one channel. They operate exactly like, exactly the same as, you know, the other. So if one moves 20% left, the other one moves 20% left with that Y harness. So you have no independent control of those two servos when they’re plugged in that way. It takes an extra channel and programming to do that. So that’s what I was kind of getting to. If you’ve got a big biplane, let’s say, and you want to put a servo on each aileron, well, there’s four channels right there. And then let’s say you want to put a servo in each elevator and you don’t want to do it through a Y harness, well, there’s two more channels. Now we’re up to six channels and we’ve only got two left and we got throttle and rudder still to do. And then if we want to do anything cool, like lights, like we can turn on and off or an opt-in. So kill switch, you know, for the gas, you know what I’m saying? So it’s important to try to select a radio that you’re not going to outgrow within the next few years because these things aren’t cheap. Right.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: You know what I mean? So once you’ve selected your wing type, then in the DX8, the next thing that’ll pop up is the tail type. And that’s sort of the same idea as the wing type, because you can have lots of different types of tails. You can have a V-tail, you can have dual rudders with one elevator, you can have dual rudders with dual, you know, elevators. You can do a V-tail and then mix the V-tail with elevator. I mean, there’s just lots of different types of tails and the modern transmitter will accommodate that and it will assign the channels for you that makes the most sense so that you can set your servos up and control them independently.

Ron: Okay.

Tom: And the DX8 is awesome. It gives you a cool little handy dandy diagram of, you know, what it is it looks like. So if your airplane looks like this, then you select this particular menu and then plug everything in just the way the DX8 tells you, which is pretty cool. So servo setup. So that’s kind of next. Something I want to say about servo setup though, you should always try to set everything up mechanically the way you want it when you can. And what I mean by that is don’t use, and I’ll talk about this later, don’t use endpoint adjustments to set the travel limits of your servo because this, the servo for whatever reason could get a stray signal, you know, when you’re sitting in the pits and you turn, I mean, and it would go past that mechanical limit you’ve set and it may bind or stripped gears or, or whatever. So you want to try to set the mechanical limits. I’m sorry. You want to try to set the limits when you can mechanically. That’s why the servo horns have all those holes in them and the servo arms, same thing. They have all those different holes in them. And so what that allows you to do is it allows you to set up the servo mechanically so that you don’t overstress it. And that should be done, you know, when you build the airplane, you know, set everything up a hundred percent on the transmitter and then set it up so that at maximum throw, i.e. maximum travel on the servo, it doesn’t bind anything. And if you, you know, let’s say you need less travel, well, that’s in hole or two holes at the servo horn or out holes at the control horn, at the control surface. If you can picture that. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Ron: Yeah. That makes sense. Set it up right when you’re, when you’re building the airplane and then using the transmitter for fine adjustments. Exactly. Yeah. Yep.

Tom: That’s exactly right. And then also kind of tying into that, I’ll talk just a little bit about mechanical advantage. So the servo has the most amount of torque closest to the output shaft. And what that means is if you have your push rod set up on the innermost hole at the servo, that is going to have more torque than the outermost hole at the servo. And it has to do with moment and arm and, and I’m not going to get into the physics of

Ron: it and leverage, right.

Tom: So if you can, and this is how I set my airplanes up too, and I’m not a professional pilot or anything like that, but, um, and I’ve, I’ve seen some 3D pilots set their airplanes up this way as well, is they’ll try to, they’ll try to get the maximum travel they want on the innermost hole that they can at the servo, because that’s where the servo provides the most amount of torque.

Ron: Mm-hmm.

Tom: If that makes sense. Yeah, I get it. So mechanical advantage, that’s what that means. So when you see that in the, sometimes you’ll actually see that in the, um, owner’s manuals for the, uh, transmitters. That’s what they’re talking about, mechanical advantage and then mechanical limits so that you don’t over, you know, overstress the servo because you’ve gone past the mechanical limit of the servo, if that makes sense.

Ron: Yeah. You don’t want to break one by, by putting too much force on it. Exactly. Yeah. Stripping gear or anything like that.

Tom: Yeah. So then, you know, I talked about, you know, endpoint adjustments and things like that. And these are abbreviated lots of different ways. Um, I think Futaba, I think they call it ATV, adjustable travel volume. Um, but on the spectrums, you know, we, they, they just call it servo travel, which is actually pretty good because that’s exactly what you’re adjusting. You’re adjusting the amount that the servo travels at maximum throw. So for some reason, let’s say you can’t set up the mechanical limits the way you want to, and you need less throw, like you can’t move them in anymore at the servo, the horn or the push rods. You can do that electronically through this, um, servo travel function. And obviously, you know, more is more travel and less is less travel on the, on the menu. Uh, so that’s one way you can set that up if you can’t do it mechanically. And, and like I said, other brands, they, they call it something else, but it’s, it’s end point adjustments. I think the EPA, that was another one that, uh, I don’t know, aertronics might use that one, but I’ve seen that one too, but that’s what they’re talking about is the amount of, that the servo actually travels from center to maximum deflection and then sub trim. So we’ll talk a little bit about trim. Um, so the modern transmitter now, we used to have slides actually on the transmitter, you know, for each function.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: Well, now there are these cool little, you know, momentary on switches, which are pretty cool. Um, and, and that I should say this about trim also, uh, when you, when you get your model flying the way you want it to, you should always try to, when you, when you bring the model back, if it has taken some trim, let’s say it’s taken some right aileron trim to make it fly straight and level. In the case of your new airplane, it took a lot of trim to make it fly straight, right? It flies straight and level. When you bring the airplane back, you should try to mechanically move that push rod such that you can recenter your trim. And the reason I say that is because it’s always easy to remember to zero your trims than to try to remember, oh, well, I think I had five degrees of up elevator for this airplane. If at the end of the flight, you zero the trim and, you know, make sure the elevator is still at that position at zero trim, you’ll always be right at zero trim. Yeah. Sort of makes sense.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: And that’s a habit that I got into a long time ago, especially after a maiden, because

Ron: not very often have I had an airplane fly hands off right off the building table.

Tom: I mean, it happens, but usually there’s at least some trim. So after the maiden flight, I get it all trimmed out so it flies straight and level and I land. I’ll, once I’ve landed, I’ll turn, you know, either leave, leave everything on or I’ll turn everything back on and I’ll actually measure the deflection at neutral stick for each control surface. And then what I’ll do is I’ll zero the trim and then I’ll mechanically move either the clevises or whatever to get back to that, whatever that measurement was at zero trim. That way I know as your trim, the airplane should be flying, you know.

Ron: Yeah. Cause it’s always best to have an airplane fly or set up to fly at zero trim. Um, so change what you can on the airframe itself as opposed to in the radio. Exactly. And yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense.

Tom: And if you make a habit out of doing that early, um, then it’s just something you kind of like a pre-flight you just sort of do without even thinking about it.

Ron: Well, not only that, but if you do go to sell it or if you change radios or something along those lines, you’re going to have an easier time setting it up. Um, it could be that the person that flew this one last when I, um, or flew it last before I had it could have had some really, really odd trim settings in their radio. And that’s why it was so off for me, even though everything was centered. Yeah.

Tom: Because you centered everything mechanically such that you thought it would fly straight and level with everything.

Ron: Well, it had the servos and everything in it still. So I didn’t have to add any of that stuff. So it would have been set up badly from them. Um, so when I’m thinking it’s going to be flying, okay, it was just set up that far off that the radio had to make up for it. So, yeah, I can understand going back and resetting that up the right way.

Tom: Yeah. So I said subtrim after, uh, we were talking about travel and subtrim is a handy thing to use if, uh, for instance, there are some airplanes out there.

Ron: Well, there are lots of airplanes out there that, that behave this way.

Tom: Some, you know, for some reason, one turn or even a half a turn on the clevis is too much in either one direction or the other. I.e. Uh, you went out and you maidened and you brought it back and you measured it and I need five degrees of up elevator to fly straight and level at about half throttle. Well, at half throttle, you, you can only get like four and a half degrees. And then if you move the clevis another half turn, now it’s five and a half degrees. I can’t get that sweet spot. But that’s what subtrims are for. Subtrims are not for getting more trim when you’ve run out of trim on the transmitter. I’ve seen so many people, you know, they, they run that aileron trim all the way to the right and it’s, they won’t go any farther. Okay. I’m going to get in my subtrim menu and get a little more. Yeah, it works, but that really is not a good way to, because now you’re out of.

Ron: It’s not best practices.

Tom: No. And when you’re talking. It’s not how you’re out of trim.

Ron: Right. And when you’re talking subtrim too, you’re talking about the menu subtrim. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m sorry. Not actually the, the click buttons that are on the transmitter. Exactly. Right.

Tom: Yeah. Yeah. So, and usually subtrim is a, is a very small percent of your overall available trim on the

Ron: trim switch on the front of the transmitter.

Tom: So what I’m saying is like, let’s say your aileron trim from zero gives you another, if you go full right trim, let’s say it gives you another five degrees of travel, subtrim might give you a half a degree if that kind of puts it in perspective. And the subtrim is an electronic thing. It’s, you know, like you said, it’s not a switch out here on the outside of the face of the

Ron: transmitter. Yeah. It’s not something you would, you would adjust while flying. Not usually. You shouldn’t.

Tom: Unless you have really, really good confidence in your airframe.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: Yeah. So that’s subtrim. And then the next thing, uh, reverse, I mean, that’s kind of self-explanatory. It basically just allows you to reverse the direction of the servo. So for instance, if you, you know, pull back on the stick and it gives you down elevator, well, you can flip the switch or get in that menu and flip the reverse on the elevator and it’ll make it go the other direction. I have the benefit of remembering when we used to have to buy reverse rotation servos. Cause there was no such thing as throttle reversing on your transmitter or, or setting the servo up so that the control horn was on the other side. If you, if you had room to do that or buying a reversing, um, there was a little thing you could plug in line with your servo that would actually electronically reverse the polarity or

Ron: whatever. Wow. Yeah. That is old school.

Tom: Yeah. So that’s reversing. And then speed, uh, on the DX8, you can adjust the speed of each channel, which is kind of cool. Uh, especially if you’ve got like, um,

Ron: landing gear is what I like to use it for. Landing gear is a great example.

Tom: You can slow it down to make it look more scale. Uh, the last time I used this function was on a B25 that I had put together for a friend and, uh, I put it on the flaps. So the flaps came down kind of slow, which was really, really actually really helpful in flight because it gave me time to adjust, you know, the back pressure on the stick or what have you. And they just look cool.

Ron: Yeah. So more scale, more realistic looking.

Tom: Right. Right. So, so those are, are some of the more basic, uh, functions that you’ll get into. Um, and then beyond that, uh, we’ll talk about dual rate and exponential, uh, dual rate is a, is a switch on the front face of the transmitter that you can flip. And on the DX8, we can select our switches, which is pretty sweet. Um, we can put our dual rate on any of these switches we want to. It’s assignable. And I think most modern transmitters are probably that way also. So on my DX8, I have, you know, let’s say my elevator dual rate is over here on the one labeled elevator dual rate and it’s a three position switch. So I can actually have three options, if you will. So, and what dual rate is, is it limits the amount of travel depending on how you have it set up and, and how you have your switch set up. So for example, an airplane that, uh, well, 3d pilots, I think sort of use this sort of technology at high angle or high alpha flight when they’re doing their crazy tricks and stuff, they’ll have maximum rates, like as much deflection as they can get. And then when they want to fly around more precision type aerobatics, they’ll go up here and they’ll flip their dual rates, which would slip, let’s say it limits the travel of all those, you know, the elevator and ailerons, uh, to 50%. So the airplane flies smoother at the same amount of stick travel. So that’s what we’re talking about with, with dual rate and how you can assign it to switches. Um, there’s lots of other ways to, to go about that also. I know some pilots will take and they will assign all of their dual rates, elevator, aileron, rudder, all of them to one switch and they’ll call it a flight mode switch. So sometimes you’ll see that out there, flight mode. And that’s another way you can, you can customize that switch to make the airplane fly the way you want it to, different styles of flying. So exponential, that’s a tough one.

Ron: That’s what I just wrote down to make sure that we were going to talk about actually.

Tom: Yeah. So what I use exponential for is I call it soft center.

Ron: It deadens the center of the stick. It can’t, right.

Tom: Or it can, it can make it the opposite too, if you don’t have it set up the other way,

Ron: the wrong way or the right way. Right. But the point is to deaden the center of the sticks.

Tom: So another good example would be the 3d type of flying. Maybe, maybe, um, maybe you’re really, maybe you were brought into the hobby, um, the good way and you were taught to fly, you know, with, with by pinching, you know, the sticks. I can’t fly that way. That’s not the way I learned. I’m a thumbs guy. I stick my thumbs right on top of the sticks just like this. And that’s not very precision. Right. So for a guy like me, I like to get in there and I like to mess with the expo exponential. And what I, and what exponential does, if you’re not familiar is it will change the way the control surface behaves with the movement of the stick. So for instance, um, exponential, just like the term exponential implies, the farther you move the stick, the more throw you get. And the, the rate of throw exponentially increases or decreases if you don’t want to follow convention. Um, and what that does is it makes the airplane less sensitive around the center, which is great for a guy like me who flies with his thumbs. Cause you know, as I get older, I’m not as smooth as I used to be.

Ron: So exponential with the thing that’s nice about that is, is you move your stick when it’s in the center, you move your stick more in order to move your control surfaces less. And then as your stick gets to the outer limits of how far you can physically move the sticks on the transmitter, your, uh, elevator, your, uh, rudder, whichever, or ailerons, whatever you have set up for will move more. Does that make sense? Am I explaining that okay? It does. So the first 75% that you can move your sticks might only move the control surfaces 25%. Exactly. But that last 25% that you move the sticks. We’ll give you the last 75%. We’ll give you the last 75%, correct, of throw on the control surfaces.

Tom: No, that’s a beautiful way of describing it.

Ron: Yeah. I hope that makes sense.

Tom: And it does. And what it does is it, it softens the, the control response around the center. So you can be a little bit more precise if you want to, especially if you’re like me and you fly with your thumbs.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: Um, but yeah, that’s, that’s a great way to describe it. The farther you move the stick, the more exponentially the throw increases. Um, yeah.

Ron: And so if you move it in a, uh, at the same speed all the way across, you will notice that the control surfaces do not move in a linear fashion. Exactly. They will move slowly at first and then move fast to get to the very end.

Tom: And I’m glad you said linear because that takes me to the next point. Which, which is? Curves. Ah. So if you thought, yeah, if you thought exponential was difficult to explain, uh, and I’ll do my best to explain, um, curves. Uh, so the DX8, we can, we can put all of our channels on and, and program, uh, curves in there. And it’s a lot like exponential, um, but it’s completely customizable. Whereas exponential is usually done as a percentage, uh, so that, you know, um, at 50% throw, you’re only at 20% actual throw on the airplane. So like, you know, 50% stick is 20% throw and then a hundred percent stick is maybe 80% throw. However you, whatever percentage you’ve assigned it to in the exponential menu. In the curve menu, you can make those numbers, whatever you want. Like you can have a U shaped curve. You can have a, a linear curve, which would be a line for those that are listening.

Ron: Or you could have, uh, if we haven’t lost everybody yet. Right.

Tom: Or you could have a kind, I mean, there’s, there’s bell curve. Completely customizable and without, without trying to really dive into it, it’s, it’s basically once you’re so comfortable with a particular airplane, usually by the, the time you get into the curves, you’re, um, flying that airplane a lot. And maybe even in competitions and you have a curve set up for a specific function. Uh, for example, I know with pattern, um, there’s a box that you have to do certain maneuvers in within these, um, boundaries and a curve. What it would allow you to do is allow you to fly your entry and exit out of the box or the parent or the boundary that you’re allowed to do the trick, you know, with a smooth, you know, kind of flying like a normal or whatever. But then you have these curves set up so that when you reach maximum throw on the stick, it’s either completely crazy, like maximum, maximum throw on the airplane. Or if it’s just a simple roll, you may flip the switch, turn the curves on and maximum throw on the stick may only be 10% throw on the actual control surface. So it’s, it’s a way of, of customizing the, the way the airplane flies with just a flip of a switch. And just like I failed to mention that just like exponential or dual rates rather, all of these functions can be turned on and off in flight with the switches, depending on how you have them assigned. So yeah, mid flight, if you’re, you’re out there doing crazy 3d stuff and then you’re like, Oh, I’m tired of this. I just want to go fly smooth again. You flip a switch and it, it turns on all your curves and your exponentials. And now you’ve got this nice smooth flying airplane that you don’t have all those maximum

Ron: throws anymore, which is easier to land, which is easier to actually fly with. Exactly. Because you don’t have necessarily have the throws that you had before. That’s exactly right. Okay.

Tom: Um, yeah, I’m not talented enough of a pilot to take full advantage of that. I don’t fly often enough.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: And I always say I’m, I’m going to, but for whatever reason, it never works out. Um, but I would like to get to a point someday when I fly that I would actually be using these switches for, for all the things that you can use them for. Of course, sticks don’t really need all that technology.

Ron: Not at all.

Tom: Um, and the next thing, um, differential that just simply means you can adjust, um, with our spectrum DX eight, any of the channels, you can make them operate more in one direction

Ron: than the next. That’s all that means.

Tom: So sometimes I know way back when we, we used to have to do this with these really, really big wheels, essentially that were on top of the servo and we would mount the, um, push rods off center. So for instance, if you could picture a wheel in front of you, and then there’s a, you know, a crosshair in the center, instead of mounting their, uh, the pivot points for your push rods right along those lines, you’d move them up and you would get differential throw that way. So some of the old trainers we used to fly, we used to use differential throw on the ailerons because you would have things like adverse yaw or other weird things going on because, you know, when the elevator dips down into the airstream, it causes more drag than it does when it moves up into the airstream. And when that drag causes a yaw, well, you know, you don’t want the left wing dragging behind when you’re trying to make a right-hand turn, you know, it sets up crazy, um, aerodynamic weirdness. So with differential, we corrected that by making it so that the aileron that was going down, say on a, let’s say our right aileron was going to go down and we’re going to make a left-hand turn, we would make it so that the right aileron would go up more than the right one went down. And that’s differential throw. And that’s really all we’re trying to correct is weird aerodynamic weirdness.

Ron: And that would be better to set up then on the radio than it would be physically on the plane?

Tom: It’s much easier to set it up in the radio because now, I mean, and there was a lot of math involved and, you know, I remember this airplane as a kid that I put together, they actually in the building manual for the airplane, they gave you a diagram on how to drill the holes on the servo horn so you’d get the proper differential throw on the ailerons. Yeah. We don’t have to do that anymore. We can do it all electronically.

Ron: Okay. So that is one plus to the new, uh, new computer radios. Oh, one after any pluses. Yeah.

Tom: Yeah. Uh, so yeah, that was differential throw. And then, uh, the last, the last real, um, well, the two topics, I guess, flap system. Um, so if you have that enabled on your transmitter, that just simply means, um, you can use your ailerons as flaps. We call those flap rons. Um, or you can have individual flaps and ailerons on your wing and that’s all assignable in the transmitter. So long as you have enough channels to, to plug those servos in.

Ron: And that’s part of the wing setup when you’re first setting up your model.

Tom: Yeah, it is, but it falls after, like in the menu, for some reason it doesn’t, they don’t put that in the DX8 to get the flap system, uh, operational, you have to select back in the original menu and the wing type that you have that sort of wing. Right.

Ron: Otherwise it won’t open up that option for you. Right.

Tom: So, and then the last thing is mixing. We can mix any channel with any channel on today’s radios, which is pretty wild.

Ron: Yeah. So if you, I mean, you can change, uh, elevator based on what your throttle position is. Yep. So if your throttle is high and you know, you need more down elevator on that to keep it flying level, you can do that all electronically.

Tom: Mix it in electronically.

Ron: Yep.

Tom: Or if you have, if you, uh, for instance, if you have an airplane that, that you like to fly knife edge, but, um, at neutral, like let’s say you have full right rudder input and neutral, everything else, uh, maybe the airplane wants to tuck to the gear, but that means it wants to like turn towards the gear.

Ron: You can, yeah, you can mix a little bit of like the more rudder you feed in, you can mix in down elevator to prevent that.

Tom: So yeah, that’s what mixing is just mixing any channel with any other channel, which is pretty useful when you’re, when you’re trying to tune out, uh, sometimes bad tendencies of airplanes.

Ron: Yeah. What about, uh, what about the different channels? So what would you use? Obviously a basic is going to be a four channel, right? What would you use the extra channels for to get up to eight or past eight, even to, you know, 10, 12, whatever, some of the, the higher. Yeah. A higher channel radius.

Tom: Well, I mean, anything you can plug into a port of your receiver could potentially be something that you would control with your transmitter. Um, I use the example of using a Y harness to, to, um, run two aileron servos. Uh, if you wanted to run those ailerons, well, you have to run those ailerons separately if you want to use them as flaps also flaperons. So that is an additional channel. So now we’re at four channels plus one more, because we have to have that open channel to plug in that extra aileron servo. Um, if you’re using separate servos, let’s say on an elevator, you’ve got two elevator halves. Maybe you want to, maybe you want to mix in a little bit of differential elevator throw when you’re, when you’re, you know, to increase your roll rate, or if you’re going to be doing some crazy, you know, Cuban eights or, or rolling circles or whatever. Well, there’s another port you need. So now we’re up to six channels. Um, but traditionally we used to think of channels as, as functions. So a basic four channel is, you know, throttle, rudder, aileron, elevator. Um, some fun things you can do. Uh, you could set up flaps just as flaps by themselves. Uh, you could set up retractable gear. You know, now we’re up to six channels. Uh, you could put maybe a bomb drop, you know, seven channels. Uh, maybe you could rig up some electric lights or something like that, you know, landing lights. If you want to turn something like that, well, there, we’re at eight channels and we haven’t even begun to split channels, you know, or, or split servos. So you can run out of channels pretty quickly is kind of what I’m getting at.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: Uh, but yeah.

Ron: Optical kill switch for a, a gasoline ignition. Exactly. Um, what else can you do? A smoke system. Smoke system. If you have a big enough plant. Yeah. There’s a bunch of other things that, that you can, that you can use channels for. So it’s really, if you’re going to go buy one, it’s best to get back in the day, we

Tom: used to use remote needle valves.

Ron: I’ve never even heard of that. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Tom: Back in the day we, we used to, um, so before there were electric ducted fans, there were ducted fans and they were nitro engine, you know, housed in the fuselage. And, uh, turning a big fan inside a big housing. And they were usually, well, a fan develops its thrust by turning it really, really fast. So these engines were usually very highly tuned, uh, crazy, crazy RPM with tune pipes and, you know, just screamers. And it was not uncommon for these things to, once you had them tuned on the ground, they would unload once they got in the air and the tune would be off. So we’d have to, we’d find ourselves tuning them a little bit lean on the ground so that when they unloaded in the air, they would richen up or vice versa. It’s been such a long time. I don’t remember, but yeah. So we had this cool little gizmo on the, on the needle valve of the, of the mother that the entire housing that the needle valve was in had an arm on it and we had it hooked up to a servo so we could fine tune the, the mixture in the air. Wow. And that was another channel.

Ron: Hmm. Yeah. Amazing how things have changed really, how things have gotten better. Oh yeah. What I was going to say is when you’re going to purchase a transmitter, get what you can afford. Yeah, absolutely. Think about what you’re going to want to do and then probably add a couple because you’re going to forget channels, you know, you’re not going to think necessarily about what you’re going to do five years down the road because these are expensive. I mean, I think I want to say that was 450 bucks, 400 bucks, maybe something like that when I bought it. And it could be, it’s been, it’s been several years since I bought it and I know new ones are the same price and they go up a lot more from there even. Right. I remember when the DX 18 came out, I just, when it came out, I, I was like, holy cow, 18

Tom: channels. I would never run out of channels. Well, I mean, guys with these big airplanes and especially the scale, the big scale airplane warbird guys that are, you know, doing competitions and stuff. Oh yeah. 18 channels is nothing.

Ron: Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing how quickly you can fill them up.

Tom: Yep. But yeah, definitely, definitely good advice. Um, buy what you can afford, uh, because you don’t want to have to buy it again later because you’re ran out of channels or functions or, or what have you.

Ron: Yeah. Yeah. So anything else you want to cover?

Tom: No. I mean, uh, I think, I think I’ve covered all the, all the stuff that I feel confident talking about. I mean, these transmitters today, they’re, they’re so capable.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: And we haven’t even talked about helicopters, which we’re not going to. We’re not going to. I have not qualified.

Ron: I don’t have a helicopter. I don’t want a helicopter. The helicopters are cool. That’s fine. But I like them.

Tom: Yeah. I have had them, you know, off and on over the years and I can fly them.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: I can fly them basic. You know, I can’t do any of the cool tricks and stuff that they can do now, but yeah, you want to talk about some complicated setups sometimes.

Ron: Ooh. Yeah.

Tom: Oh, I was going to say, um, with the, uh, so because I’m old and I’ve been in the hobby a long time, I’ve seen some crazy, uh, workarounds. So we’re talking about flaperons. So nowadays you’re just, Oh, I want flaperons. I’ll just put a servo in each wing panel, drive them on separate channels, mix it in my transmitter. I’m good to go. Well, it used to be, uh, in fact, there was a company, man, I can’t remember the name of it, but they made a tray. You had to cut a big piece or design a big piece in the center section of the wing to house this tray. And what it was, it was a, a tray that slid on two rails and you put a servo right in the middle of it. And it would be your aileron servo, right? So it’d be a standard aileron set up with one servo, but the tray would move back and forth and the tray was driven by another servo. So that’s how you mixed your flaperons. So as the tray would move back and forth, it would change where they’re, yeah, they would go up or down together. But then as the aileron servo rotated within the tray, then that’s how you got your aileron function.

Ron: Mechanical engineering over computer engineering. That’s amazing. I used to own one of those. That just seems like it would go wrong so easily. It would get bound up.

Tom: It would get, you know, it worked really, really well. Really? Yeah, it really did. It was, I’m trying to think of the airplane that that was on. It was a big high wing thing, not, not a stick and it wasn’t, it wasn’t a trainer. But yeah, that’s, that’s how we, that’s how we did flaperons back then. That’s amazing. Perhaps some of our listeners will remember that. If we, and make me not be the only old guy.

Ron: If we have any listeners left at this point. Right. This was, this was kind of in depth.

Tom: It was a tough one. I understand.

Ron: Yeah. But we got through it. Hopefully it was enough to describe some things for people that didn’t know what they were talking about. There was some stuff in there I didn’t quite understand. Uh, I’ve not used any of the curves, you know, I use exponential, but I’ve never used any curves. I don’t think I probably would, but it’s good to know kind of what it would be used for. Yeah. Um, so yeah, I mean, it was an interesting discussion, but very factual. Right.

Tom: So, um, I was going to say, uh, something, but it wasn’t that important, I guess. Okay. Totally slipped my mind. It happens when you get older.

Ron: Anything else?

Tom: No, that’s, uh, I think, oh, what I wanted to say was, um, if anybody, if I’ve confused anybody out there or if I’ve gotten it wrong, um, feel free to hit us up, uh, text us at the, at the number there that we gave you at the beginning of the program, uh, send us an email, uh, and we’ll, I’ll try to correct it or whatever on the, on the, on the show.

Ron: Well, if Tom was wrong and what he said, be sure to email him direct, leave me alone. Cause that was not what I was saying. Um, that’s Tom at rcplanelab.com. And, uh, you know, if you just want to tell me that I was doing good and listened to a lot of stuff today, my email address is ron at rcplanelab.com. But, uh, yeah, be sure.

Tom: You could also email Ron and tell him everything I got wrong. I’m sure he would love to hear that.

Ron: That’s true. I guess I’ll, I’ll read it before I forward it on and make fun of you a little bit for it, but that’s all I got. All right. Me too. Uh, until next time I’m Ron. I’m Tom. Thank you for listening. Yep. See you later.

Announcer: Hope you enjoyed this episode of the RC Planelab podcast. For topic suggestions, to ask questions, or to give anything back, connect with us at rcplanelab.com or email us direct at either ron at rcplanelab.com or tom at rcplanelab.com. You can also text us or leave us a voicemail at 818-351-9846. Please subscribe, rate, and review us on your favorite podcast app. Until next time, may your landings be gentle.

Ron & Tom: We’ll see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Announcer: For anyone interested in RC Airplane, we’ll share tips and tricks on how to build models and talk about successful flights, epic crashes, and everything in between. Visit us at rcplanelab.com to sign up for our email list and to ask us questions. You can also text us or leave us a voicemail at 818-351-9846. Please help us out by rating and reviewing us in your favorite podcast app. Thanks for spending time with us today. Now here are your hosts, Ron and Tom.

Ron: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Episode 3 of the RC Plane Lab Podcast. I’m Ron. I’m Tom. Today we’re going to be talking about pre-flight checks.

Tom: Very, very important subject.

Ron: Very important. Before you take off, you need to do some checks on your airplane. That’s right. Actually, before we talk about that, though, have you had any time to work on anything since last we spoke?

Tom: Well, not at home. We did do a little bit of work here in the RC Plane Lab dungeon. If you will.

Ron: Almost got the stick recovered.

Tom: Looks like we’re about ready to do some installation of the senior telemaster as well. Yeah. Some good progress.

Ron: We’re getting close on that, too. I’ve got some servos put in. The engine’s mounted. A little bit more. The graphics are done. Yeah. It’s looking good. We’re getting toward the end of it.

Tom: Yeah. We’ll have to post some pictures.

Ron: Yeah. And then after we’re done with this, we’ll move on to another plane.

Tom: Yep.

Ron: Something next.

Tom: Yep. There’s always another project.

Ron: Yeah. Actually, before we get started. Okay. So, also this week, I decided to get out a couple. I know we’re not supposed to talk about them, but I have some quadcopters also.

Tom: You can talk about them.

Ron: Well, I learned a very important lesson. So, I have, I think, 500 mAh one-cell LiPo batteries, and then I have a couple 250 mAh one-cell LiPo batteries that are actually for an airplane, a small one. But, I have a charger that goes onto a computer, and I thought, you know what? I’m just going to charge them all together and be done. It’s a five-port charger. Right. But, it’s the same connector on the end of everything. Didn’t think anything about it. Threw the batteries on the charger, and I walked away.

Tom: Uh-oh. I don’t like where this story’s going.

Ron: So, my daughter is actually playing in the living room where the computer was, and all of a sudden, I started to smell smoke.

Unidentified speaker: Oh, no.

Ron: Well, of course, I got scared. So, I ran in there, and I thought, you know, I forgot that I was charging a battery, and all of a sudden, you smell smoke, and you’re like, it’s a burning smell. Yeah. Well, so, I got in there, and I told Piper, I said, let’s go. By the way, my daughter’s name is Piper. I don’t know why, huh?

Tom: And cute as a button.

Ron: Thank you very much. But, anyway, so, we got out of the room and stuff, and then I looked over there by the computer. There was a nice column of smoke coming up, going up to the ceiling.

Tom: That’s not good.

Ron: So, I, you know, I got her safely out of the way, and I went back in there.

Tom: Yeah. So, the battery charger was melting.

Ron: I mean, it was-

Tom: Oh, the charger?

Ron: The charger itself was melting. Yeah. I thought it was a battery at first, too, when I saw the smoke coming from there.

Tom: That would have been my guess.

Ron: So, when I went, I get, you know, unplugged it, put it out in the garage, and got it cooled down. I had no idea that the batteries would be wired backwards. The 250 milliamp hour battery was reversed from the 500 milliamp hour battery on which pull, I guess, which wire was hot and which was black. So, be very careful.

Tom: That’s bizarre.

Ron: Because apparently they’re not all wired the same way.

Tom: Same connectors.

Ron: Same connectors.

Tom: Mm-hmm. But just wired differently. Wired differently. And- Okay, that’s kind of scary.

Ron: I know. So, be very careful when you’re charging your batteries like that. You know, I’ve never dealt with a lot of those small ones for multiple planes, drones,

Tom: whatever.

Ron: But yeah, that was a major learning experience for me. I was very surprised by that.

Tom: Yeah. I would have been, too.

Ron: Well, and it’s not like I wired anything backwards.

Tom: That’s how they came out of the package.

Ron: You know, I’ve had the batteries for probably two or three years, just never charge them on a different charger than what came with it. Yeah. And this time I thought, well, instead of having two different battery chargers plugged into the same computer, use the same charger.

Tom: And you can’t do that. Well, I mean, I think we would all kind of- Assume. Assume.

Ron: Right.

Tom: That if it’s got the same connector, well, it’s probably wired the same as every other battery that uses that connector. Yeah. Man, that’s bizarre. Very- So, it’s a very good lesson. Yeah. Yeah. Check the polarity of those batteries.

Ron: Luckily, nothing bad happened, so- Wow.

Tom: Well, it’s a good thing you caught it early, too. Yeah.

Ron: A lesson learned.

Tom: Yeah. I mean, it was sitting right next to your computer, too.

Ron: Yeah. In a living room on, you know, carpet on a wooden desk and- Good grief. Could have been bad.

Tom: That’s, yeah, that’s a good lesson. So, yeah, from now on, folks, if you’re charging multiple batteries on a charger that maybe didn’t come with that battery- Totally, yeah. Double-check the polarity. Make sure that it’s charging correctly.

Ron: Yeah. And the polarity’s correct.

Tom: Yeah, that’s scary.

Ron: Yeah, I just wanted to bring that up.

Tom: And LiPo batteries kind of scare me anyway. I- Yeah, you’ve heard all- I mean, they’re really, really safe nowadays, folks, but when LiPo’s first came out, I was around when they first came out. And, yeah, they were very, very volatile, you know, early on.

Ron: Well, they still are, but I think a lot has to do with how you treat them.

Tom: Well, right.

Ron: And the safeties that are built into the- into electronics these days are a lot better.

Tom: The charger, yeah. The chargers and the cutoffs on the speed controllers and things like that, but-

Ron: Yeah, which surprised me, because on most of the chargers I have for the bigger ones, you know, they will tell you if it’s reverse polarity. And this one didn’t, it just went straight through and- Just went on.

Tom: Yeah. I wonder if the batteries weren’t registering any voltage when you plugged them in.

Ron: No, they were not dead-dead. Really? Wow. Because I had used them. Yeah. Huh.

Tom: Yeah. So, needless to say, you’re looking for a new charger.

Ron: New charger and at least one new battery. Right, right.

Tom: But, yeah. So, like I said, I just wanted to bring that up and- Yeah, that’s very good to bring that to light, because I would have just assumed.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: That they were all, you know, if they use the same connector, they’re wired the same, but apparently they’re not. So, let that be a lesson to all of you.

Ron: Yeah, like I said, even the chargers, though, were backwards. Yeah. Because it’s how it was-

Tom: Different manufacturers?

Ron: Different manufacturers, yeah.

Tom: Yeah, and on those smaller batteries, I mean, who changes the connectors on those? I mean, like on the bigger batteries, I’ll put, you know, a Dean’s connector on it or whatever.

Ron: XT-60 is what I use most of the time.

Tom: Yeah, or whatever. And, you know, if you’re soldering them on there, you tend to do everything the same, so it’s compatible with your chargers and-

Ron: Well, and the XT-60 actually also, or tells you on the connector itself, positive and negative. Right, right.

Tom: So, you don’t make that mistake. That’s how the Dean’s R2, but-

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: But, yeah, those little tiny batteries, I mean, nobody, I mean, I don’t know anybody that changes the connector on those.

Ron: No, you buy them, and they only plug into one thing most of the time. So, yeah, I was very surprised by that.

Tom: Yeah.

Ron: So, be careful and check before you charge. Yep. Anyway, moving on, pre-flight checks.

Tom: Yeah, pre-flight. So, pretty important subject, something you should do before every flight. Every flight. Yeah, it’s just, I mean, basically a pre-flight, no matter what type of airplane you’re talking about, nitro gas, electric, its function is the same for all of those. And it’s basically just a quick once-over. Doesn’t have to be really, really involved, but making sure that the control surfaces are doing what you’re commanding them to do. And that’s essentially what it is.

Ron: Okay, so let’s go through what do you do when you go to the field.

Tom: So, for me, once, you know, we’re assuming, you know, you’ve already done all the other stuff that we’ll cover later. Yeah, the yearly, like once-a-year checks and stuff. But basically, you’re ready to put the airplane on the ground and take off and fly. So, this is what I do, okay? I start with the ailerons. Actually, I take that back. I actually start with the elevator. And as everyone, maybe not everyone knows, but most people know, you know, you pull back on the transmitter to go up with the airplane. So, what I do is I, as I’m pulling the elevator stick back, I’m looking at the elevator, and it should rise up to meet me. So, you pull back on the stick, and the elevator kind of rises up to meet it as you’re watching it. And then, just the opposite, you push the stick forward, and the elevator goes down. That’s number one. That’s where I start. Because that, to me, the elevator is the number one channel. It’s like the number one most important, you know, without an elevator, you know, you can’t really do anything about trying to climb. And your attitude in the air, yeah. Yeah, so, that’s the first one. Then, I move on to the ailerons, which is on the same stick here in America. So, same kind of thing. I’m just looking at the airplane as I’m moving the stick. So, if I move the aileron stick to the right, as I’m looking at the airplane as if I was sitting in the cockpit, you know, looking forward out the nose, I would look at the right aileron, and as I move the stick to the right, the right aileron should rise up to meet me, you know, or my thumb, give my thumb a high five, whatever you want to call it. And the left aileron should obviously be moving in the opposite direction. And then, vice versa, when I move the stick to the left.

Ron: All right, next.

Tom: Yeah, so then, moving on, I move over to the left stick with a rudder. And as I’m, once again, you know, looking down at the airplane as if I was sitting in the cockpit, move the rudder stick to the left. And as I’m watching the airplane, the trailing edge of the rudder should also move towards the left.

Ron: And vice versa, move the stick to the right, the trailing edge of the rudder should move to the right.

Tom: And then, last is the throttle. A couple of different ways you can do that with an electric. electric, probably you’ve already got the programming set up so that forward is forward and back is brake. Or if you have one of those cool airplanes that’ll do reverse, it’ll, you know, do reverse or whatever. I recommend doing that with a prop off, at least initially for the first programming. That gets into some other stuff we’re going to talk about later. But on a nitro airplane or a gas airplane, you can do it with the engine not running, especially if you can see the carburetor. You know, obviously you push the stick forward, gives a gas, it should be opening the throat of the carburetor.

Announcer: Okay.

Ron: Yeah, so I’m a little bit different, but pretty much the same as what you do. Yeah. I do ailerons first because I go by looking at the airplane. Sure. So I’ll do the ailerons first, left, left up, right, right up. And then I go back to the elevator, pull back on that to make sure it goes up. And then I just do the rudder. Yeah. And then, you know, you do, if you’re flying nitro, you’ll do a run up on your motor after it started on the ground. Yep. Uh, you’ll do a run up on that before you take off to make sure you clear it out and make sure you can get full throttle. Um, and then kind of the same thing with electric. I’ll run that all the way up too, just to make sure there’s no.

Tom: Well, I have a timer set on my transmitter.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: Uh, and transmitter, most transmitters these days are all programmable. So you can like, for instance, on my old DX8, I have it so that it starts a timer when I hit full throttle the first time.

Ron: And then when I pull it back, now I’ve got a timer.

Tom: Yeah. Because I kind of know kind of in advance of how much time I can get with each airplane that I fly. Yeah. So I set a countdown timer. And that’s a good idea. That way you don’t run out of battery when you’re flying.

Ron: Right.

Tom: Right. So, and that’s the same thing for electric. Run it all the way up to set my timer and kind of kills, you know, two birds with a stone, so to speak.

Ron: And most of the time with electrics too, it won’t arm until you go full throttle and then back down to nothing. Yep. Um, and that’s, that’s very handy too.

Tom: Yeah. And then, so once the pre-flight is over, you know, once everything I’ve verified that everything’s moving correctly and everything is going the directions it should be going, um, you know, you’re ready for takeoff. So next thing to do is check the runway and make sure the runway is clear. Nobody’s on it, you know, retrieving an airplane or something like that. And I’ll kind of get a quick glance in the path that I’m going to take off, make sure there’s no airplanes in my takeoff path and off we go.

Ron: Yeah. Check the windsocks, see which way it’s blowing and decide which way you’re going to take off on the runway.

Tom: Yeah.

Ron: Right. But yeah, take off into the wind all the time.

Tom: Yeah. It’s amazing how many times I’ve seen people get that wrong.

Ron: Yeah. I know. With landing too, and landing scares me more than taking off.

Tom: Yeah.

Ron: Because if you have a, a tailwind, when you’re landing, you’re going to lose your lift and it will just fall like a, like a brick.

Tom: Yep. And usually not, and not, um, in a good way.

Ron: Well, yeah, because when you’re landing, you’re already going slow. Slow, exactly.

Tom: You have your throttle down.

Ron: Right. You know, you’re, you’re getting ready to take the airspeed away. Right. So if there’s a tailwind that hits fast, the airspeed just goes away.

Tom: Right. Usually with, with landing, you’re decelerating. So you’re, you’re already kind of, you know, losing momentum. At least with a takeoff downwind, you’re, you’re accelerating, hopefully. Right. So you can, you have that momentum that if, you know, you happen to get off the ground a little early, you know, you may have a little bit of extra time because you’re already accelerating.

Ron: Yeah. And full throttle, which helps a lot too when you need the extra power. Right. It’s already, yeah, exactly.

Tom: Yep. But yeah, I mean, that’s pretty much, uh, that’s pretty much how I accomplish a pre-flight and I do that every time I fly. Oh, absolutely. Like every, every time I take off, it’s a quick, I mean, once you’ve done it a few times, I mean, it’s almost. It becomes habit to me. Exactly.

Ron: Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I have a little, uh, a little checklist that I carry with me. That’s a laminated. Nice. And that way you can just check it just to make sure you don’t forget anything.

Tom: Yeah. So you don’t miss anything.

Ron: Right. Actually, I’ll, uh, I’ll go ahead and post it on the website for, uh, under the show. And if anybody wants to go download it, they can download it. And I would recommend, um, laminating it. That way it doesn’t get messed up. You know, it’s, it’s three by five, four by six. I don’t remember how big it is. A business car. Maybe a little bit bigger. Something small. Uh, and just throw it in the, um, into your, your case with your transmitter. That way you always have it no matter what you’re flying. And that’s a very good, a good tool to have with you.

Tom: I, I actually have a confession to make. Like I, I don’t do a pre-flight every single time. I mean, I, I try to, but there’ve, but there’ve been, there’ve been at least one time that I can remember that I, that I didn’t do a proper pre-flight.

Ron: Oh. And, and did something happen on that time you didn’t do a proper pre-flight?

Tom: Well, yeah, we’ve, we’ve talked about it before, but, um. Yeah. I forgot about that.

Ron: Do, do tell, please.

Tom: Everybody loves crash stories, right?

Ron: Absolutely.

Tom: So, yeah, um, I had acquired a, an airplane from a friend, um, that was fuel soaked and we can, we can talk about, uh, fuel soaked airframes and how to bring them back to life, if you will, uh, some other time. But I had acquired this is a Pica dualist. If anybody listening knows what that is, it’s a twin engine, uh, pattern plane, pattern type plane. So it’s very smooth, very fast, um, kind of a precision aerobatic kind of a design, you know, from the seventies. Um, and I think Pica made the kid even into the eighties, but either way, got this airplane from a friend and it was fuel soaked. So I, I took the airplane, completely stripped it, uh, treated the airframe, uh, put it back, you know, recovered it, put it back together over the course of a winter. Uh, this was, uh, quite a while ago, I was a college student, so it took some time, uh, and it wasn’t cheap, you know, covering is expensive and, you know, you got to replace batteries and things like that. And I didn’t, I don’t recall, but I don’t think I got the engines with the airframe.

Ron: So I had to, you know, buy engines, things like that.

Tom: Uh, but anyway, uh, when I reinstalled the radio, I just assumed that I put everything back exactly the way it came out. You know, the right aileron servo was in the right panel. The left aileron servo was at the left panel. I had the, you know, I had the, you know, the control linkages on the inside or the outside, whatever it happened to be assumed that I had put everything back exactly the way it came out. So in theory, it should have been perfect, right? Cause it flew fine, you know, when I got it, which by the way, I had, I had flown that

Ron: airplane previously.

Tom: So yeah, I spent all that time putting it back together, took it to the field, um, you know, and friends watching, you know, cause I was, had been working on this thing all winter, you know, met some friends at the field who were also flying. Um, and they were excited cause it looked really cool. It was a beautiful airplane and I fired everything up, ran the engines up, tuned them so that they were in sync and twin engine. Uh, and I neglected, I did not do a proper pre-flight. I mean, I ran the throttles up, that was good. It had retractable gear and I had tested the gear up and down on the bench at home. And not one time did I ever really think, even in the, in the reconstruction phase, did I think to check that the ailerons were moving the correct direction or the elevator or the

Ron: rudder?

Tom: Not one time cause I’ve just assumed, you know, so I’m at the field and I’m ready to take off and, you know, a little bit of nerves, you know, it’s a, it’s kind of a maiden, you know, I’ve, even though the airplane used to fly, it’s, it’s, it’s been deconstructed and reconstructed, right?

Ron: Well, even if not, when it’s new to you and rebound to your transmitter and stuff, it is pretty much the days of being rebound when it’s reconnected because you’re right. I guess that would be the FM days, right? But it’s still a good idea to check everything, everything when you first fly an airplane

Tom: and that’s kind of, even as you’re putting it together, I mean, I, I didn’t do any of that.

Ron: Well, I mean, I almost consider it a maiden when you just get an airplane yourself.

Tom: Oh, okay.

Ron: Because somebody else might’ve flown it, but it’s set up completely different now that you have it, unless you bought it exactly how they had it.

Tom: Right.

Ron: If you got the same transmitter from them, then I guess it’s not really a maiden, but anytime it’s on a new transmitter, new electronics, it’s a maiden.

Tom: This was a, it was a, all the internal electronics were, um, I got with the airframe and all I

Ron: had to do was plug my receiver in. Okay.

Tom: So at the time, I mean, and it was, you know, it was a JR to JR, so everything should move the same direction from JR to anyway. So I’m ready to take off and Randy and, you know, everything’s running good and a little bit of nerves and luckily this particular field, um, many, many moons ago, very, very long field, um, and had paved runways, crisscrossing room. So a lot of room to fix anything should, you know, somehow, you know, you don’t, you have an engine out or whatever. There’s plenty of room at this place. So I taxi out and I go taxi to the complete end of the, I mean, we’re talking like a 25, 30 second long taxi out to the, I don’t know if, yeah, I don’t know if it was because of nerves or if I was trying to, you know, try not to, I wanted to put on a show or whatever. But anyway, I get to the end of the field and I’m, you know, running the throttles up and man, this thing just rockets down the runway. I mean, just engines were screaming. They were perfectly tuned. You know, it was one of those picture perfect takeoffs, you know, it’s just right about, you know, we’re in front of me, it, it kind of rotates and it lifts off and it’s, it’s just climbing out so nice and beautiful start to throttle back. Cause it’s, you know, gaining some speed and I don’t really want to fly it around in full throttle on this first flight, you know, and then I go to make a turn and you know, it happened so fast. Looking back on it, it happened so fast and I had no time to react, but cause this thing was, was hauling. And I go to make a, I believe it was a left-hand turn. I was going to do a left-hand pattern, you know, get everything trimmed and then bring it back in and check everything. So I go to make a left turn and the thing, you know, starts rolling like violently to the right. And, you know, looking back at, I should have, you know, reduced the throttle a little bit more. And obviously, you know, I should have realized right off that the ailerons were backwards, but I didn’t. And the thing rolled and rolled. I mean, it rolled, it was still rolling when it hit the ground. And I managed to pull the throttles back to idle before it crashed. But yeah, it was a, it was a kit again. Wow.

Ron: When it was done.

Tom: Yeah. I took it home for the longest time. I had this bucket, this plastic, just a pail, you know, two gallon pail, whatever. And that was my dualist bucket because that’s what I had in the car that day. I used it to keep, you know, car washing supplies in. And that’s what I collected all the parts in for that airframe. Yeah. When it was all done.

Ron: So I had a dualist bucket and that sat in my closet for a really, really long time because I couldn’t bring myself to buy another one. Didn’t have a part to get rid of it. Yep.

Tom: So, no, that’s too bad. And all due to a neglect of a pre-flight. Yeah. Had I done a proper pre-flight? I mean, who knows? That airplane might still be flying today. I mean, I’ve got some old airplanes, but.

Ron: Literally that half second of checking the aileron could have saved the whole thing.

Tom: Saved everything.

Ron: Yeah. It’s a tough lesson learned, but I bet you haven’t forgotten to do one since then.

Tom: I don’t think I have.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: Um, I mean, I’m sure there’s times I’ve been, you know, in a rush or whatever, but I, I try to, I try to do it every single time. Even if, even if I’ve flown that airplane previously the same day, I’ll do it again just because you just never know.

Ron: Yeah. It’s pre-flight. So anytime you land and take off, especially if the battery’s been taken out, if you’ve turned anything off. Yeah. You always make sure that everything is moving the way it’s supposed to moving freely and ready to go.

Tom: And once you get in the habit, folks, it really, I mean, it takes no time at all.

Ron: Yeah. It’s gotta be what? Three or four seconds at most.

Tom: Yeah. Because you get in, you know, you’ll get into a rhythm of, of doing it. And then anytime you do it from that point on, if something’s not right, you pick it out just like that.

Ron: And you fix it.

Tom: So very, very important. Don’t, don’t neglect it and get in the habit of doing it every single time.

Ron: Yeah. So that is what you do when you, you know, are at the field and you’re, you’re flying an airplane. So what else would you check at the beginning of the flying year?

Tom: Oh yeah. Yeah. So like annually, like a, like a pre-season kind of a once over. Like an annual checkup. Yeah. Like an annual checkup.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: Yeah. I, so I, I check all of that, you know, pretty much a pre-flight. And then me personally, um, I check everything on the airframe, you know, first and foremost, um, batteries, uh, batteries over winter. You know, sometimes I’m not really good about storing them on a storage charge or, or what have you, or if they’re a nickel metal hydride, you know, re-peaking them so often or whatever. I’m really terrible about neglecting my batteries over the winter.

Ron: Right.

Tom: Me too. And we do have a winter here where we live. We do have a winter where we can’t fly.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: It’s just simply too cold. So the first thing I’ll check, you know, before the flying season is all my batteries, like all of them, nickel metal hydrides, lithium polymers, lithium ions, whatever you’re using, check them all and check them according to the manufacturer’s recommendations.

Ron: Right.

Tom: Um, myself, nickel metal hydrides, I’ve got a really great charger. Um, it’s a little older, but it’s, it does a great job. It, it will cycle the packs and it’ll cut them off at a safe voltage. And then it will give me a readout of the estimated capacity of that battery pack. And if that’s not pretty close to the rated capacity of the battery, I just replace it or I’ll use it for a bench test battery or what have you.

Ron: Yeah. So on mine, when you do it, like I can charge and discharge up to six times, like six cycles without any, without putting hands on it. Um, and then I’ll, I don’t, like I said, I don’t know how yours works, but mine will tell you at the end, how many, uh, uh, milliamp hours it put in and then how many it took out. Yep. How many it put in, how many it took out. And those should be cycle. Oh yeah. For each cycle you can go through and see.

Tom: Oh, I thought, I thought, okay.

Ron: No, it’s, yeah, it’s for each cycle. So, and, and you can tell like on batteries when they’re a little bit older, uh, that haven’t been charged for a while, those numbers get to be a lot closer together towards the end of the charge cycles. Oh, okay. So you might be, you know, if you’re a 2000 milliamp hour battery, you might be putting in 1500 taken out a thousand towards the end of that cycle. You know, you might be putting in 1800 and taking out 1700. Oh, okay. So you can tell that it’s kind of bringing it back to life. And as long as you’re, you’re taking out close to what you’re putting in, then, you know, you have a pretty good battery still.

Tom: Yeah.

Ron: And then I also check it under draw to make sure it’s not, you know, dropping voltage and that with our checkers too.

Tom: I’ve got, yeah. And most, most, uh, folks that fly with a lot of, uh, lipo power stuff, they should in their field box or whatever they take with them, you know, when they’re flying should have a, one of those load testers. They’re cheap. They’re easy to get. You plug it into your lipo battery and usually they, they give you a percentage. I think the one I have, when you plug it in, it pops up a percentage of, you know.

Ron: Yeah. For lipo is the one I have tells you the actual voltage. I don’t do the, I don’t have my one that, or the one that does the percentage, but I’m talking about the nickel metal hydride ones. Oh, okay. So I still do a, a load charge on that too, or a load test on that and see what the, I

Tom: still have, I still use my, uh, my, uh, tower hobbies way back in the day. Uh, it’s an analog gauge.

Ron: Well, it works, but it works.

Tom: It puts a load on the batteries and it gives, and there’s like a, you know, a range that’s green. Um, and also has numbers, you know, printed on the dial, but, um, I still use that to this day. Green, yellow, and red.

Ron: And you know what? It has never failed me.

Tom: No. Every time, every time that I’ve checked a battery. And it hasn’t been in that green range or well into that green range, I haven’t flown and I’ve never, I have not lost a airplane due to a dead battery.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: That’s good. So.

Ron: It’s important to keep those changed. Yeah. If you keep up on your equipment, you won’t have the failures that you do if you don’t. Yep.

Tom: So, yeah. So the annual pre or the preseason, uh, checkup, that’s the first thing I do is the batteries.

Ron: Um, and that’s usually not in the plane for all of them either. I mean, you can take those out pretty easily in charge.

Tom: No? No, you should absolutely take, take them out of the airplane to do that. Okay.

Ron: Yeah. Lipos you don’t keep in a plane, but I mean, I understand like some of the.

Tom: Well, I keep. So.

Ron: And also like for us that fly gasoline, you’re going to have two sets of batteries too. Right. So I understand that that’s going to be a little bit more difficult to get to, to take out.

Tom: But. If you can’t take them out of the airplane, at least unplug them. That’s a very minimal.

Ron: What do you mean?

Tom: Well, so.

Ron: Like at the end of the year or.

Tom: Well, you should unplug them, you know, between flights and after flights and things like that. But for winter, um, I, I do know, you know, several people that, you know, have either forgotten and let them plugged in. Oh. Yeah. I’ve turned the switch off. So it’s good. Right. Well, maybe. There’s still a little bit of a draw. There’s probably, yeah, there’s probably some draw there, but if you can’t take them out of the, I’m terrible. Like I leave all my batteries in the airplane. I unplug them all. Right. But I, I do. I’m, I’m terrible about that. Mostly because I don’t have a lot of room where my stuff is stored and, you know, trying to wrestle around a 50 CC airplane in my little tiny basement to get the batteries out can be kind of a challenge sometimes. So I leave them in. Um, but on my lipos and lithium ions and things like that, I do. Make sure that my, my charger has a cool feature. And I think most do, it’ll take them up to the storage charge or take them down to a storage charge. So I do that and I check them, you know, kind of regular throughout the winter. But, um, yes, it’s a, it’s a, it would be a very good idea, especially with the lithium batteries to get them out of the airframes and put them in a, you know, a battery bag or box or one of those safe boxes or whatever.

Ron: And that’s especially true if you’re not storing them in a basement or if you’re not storing them somewhere that’s climate controlled. Right. Cause the heat and the cold, more so the heat is really bad on, on batteries. Yeah. So.

Tom: Yeah. That’s a good point. Um, that the storage of the batteries is, is very important. I should have hit on that too. Um, any lithium style battery, lithium ions, lithium polymers, lithium, uh, what’s the other one? Iron, whatever they are. Yeah. Store them in a safe, one of those, you know, battery box or a battery bag, something that will protect everything around it. Should that battery go off. Yeah. Um, that’s, yeah.

Ron: And that, that’s more of, that’s more of an issue with lipos than anything else. Right. Yeah. Actually, I keep my lipos in the refrigerator. Um, I don’t know if that’s the best way to do it, but I, I remember being told that, um, you know, a high thirties, low forties is a good temperature to keep them and low humidity is very good for them also. So the, I mean, the only place I have in the house that’s always that temperature and low humidity is going to be the refrigerator and we have multiple fridges. So it’s not like it’s our main one in the, in the living room or in the kitchen. Sorry. It’s out in the garage, but still.

Tom: Yeah. We’re not saying store your batteries next to the grapes in the fridge.

Ron: No, no, you know, but yeah, that’s where I keep mine. Yeah. At least a battery safe, uh, device, um, ammo cans are great for that actually. So, but yeah.

Tom: Anyway, that, so, you know, the batteries, that’ll be the first thing I check. Uh, and then, uh, I’ll go kind of over the airframe and just make sure that, you know, all the hardware is still tight.

Ron: Mm-hmm.

Tom: Um, make sure that there’s nothing bent, you know, like landing gear or, or, you know, push rods, anything like that. Um, you know, just kind of look it over, give it a once over, make sure, uh, that nothing obvious is, uh, standing out. And then I always like to, to, you know, check the balance on all my props, uh, in the spring before I start flying. Um, vibration is a, is a terrible thing. Does weird things to electronics, um, sets up weird harmonics and you never know what’s sort of, you know, RF noise, you know, something metal on metal rubbing in the air, in the airframe, vibrating, what that kind of signal that puts out. So check, check the prop balance.

Ron: So you do that on every plane before you fly it in the summer then?

Tom: Yep. I mean, I, I try to, uh, there’s airplanes that I know I’m not going to fly that summer,

Ron: so I’ll, I’ll leave them alone. Well, yeah.

Tom: But on the air, on the airplanes that I know I’m going to fly, uh, for sure, uh, I will, you know, pull the prop off. It doesn’t take long and, you know, if you, I like airplanes, I like tinkering, so it’s kind of one excuse I have to tinker with my airplanes.

Ron: And what, like, what, uh, what size propellers do you do? Because obviously, oh, any.

Tom: I check them all.

Ron: Anything, even the, like, five inch little electric ones?

Tom: Well, those are more difficult to balance, right? Right. Uh, because the balancers, you know, they, maybe not, the rollers aren’t smooth or if you’re using a magnetic balancer, you know, the, those things, it takes forever to balance

Ron: a prop with those.

Tom: But yeah, I, I try to balance as many of them as I can.

Ron: Okay.

Tom: Um, even on the small electric ones, an out of balance propeller is just no fun at all. And they sound terrible, if you ask me.

Ron: Yeah. It does have a weird, um, harmonic to it, I guess. Buzz or whatever you want to call it. Yeah.

Tom: Um, but yeah, I, I, I try to check all of them and the bigger the prop, the, the more important it is, you know, cause you don’t, certainly don’t want an out of balance prop on a big 50 CC, you know, airplane because that’s just no good for anybody.

Ron: Or, or 170 CC.

Tom: Or, yeah.

Ron: Yeah. I don’t have any quite that big, but. I gotcha.

Tom: Yeah. Um, and then the next thing you know is, uh, what better, you know, you’re already going to have the, the propeller off to balance it. But you may as well go over the engine just once. If it’s a nitro or a gasser, um, look it over, you know, make sure there’s no weird, uh, like, uh, was it last? It may have been last summer. There was, uh, I had an airplane that had a, had a weird, um, what’s the word I’m looking for? Like this sooty black oily drip, like underneath where it sat all winter. Uh, and, uh, so I, upon further investigation, you know, once I had the prop off, I looked at the engine and sure enough, I had a crankcase, a front crankcase bearing that was leaking. Oh. Uh, and on a nitro plane that, that can wreak havoc cause it allows air into the mixture and, you know, the air, the engine doesn’t run like it’s supposed to. So I found that on the, you know, on the annual checkup while the prop was off. I had to look at the engine and that’s where I noticed where it was coming from.

Ron: So, and that’s a good time to find problems, not when you’re at the field trying to start it, trying to figure out why it doesn’t run right. After you’ve taken all the time to get stuff ready and hold out to the field, it’s good to have a decent plane that’s been checked before you head out.

Tom: Right. And even electrics with the prop off, you know, if you grab the electric motor and kind of turn it a little bit by hand, you’ll be able to feel, you know, the strength of the magnets, you know, or if there’s a bearing maybe hanging up. Yeah. You’ll start to feel a weird, like almost like a grittiness to it. Exactly.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: Uh, so, you know, it’s a good time to, to do all that, you know, with the motor or an, or a gasser. Uh, and then, you know, if, if we’re, if we’re dealing with nitro or gas, this would be a good time to, to look at the tank and the lines. Uh, make sure the clunk is, you know, free to move about inside the tank. Um, a lot of gassers over time, that Tigon fuel tubing will get like stiff over time. It’ll dry out. Yeah. And so when the airplane’s upside down, the clunk is still stuck at the bottom of the tank, which is now, right. So the wrong side up and now it’s running out of fuel when every time you go upside down, that’s no fun.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: So yeah, check over the tank, you know, make sure the seam on the tank, every tank or not every tank, most tanks are plastic and they’re molded in two pieces and there’s a seam usually. And those seams, you know, over time can, you know, separate or whatever and develop leaks. So this would be a good time to kind of check that.

Ron: Well, and the other thing with the fuel lines too, is if they do dry out and they get brittle when you’re flying with all the vibrations from just flying in general, from an imbalanced propeller, right. Just from a nitro engine. Right. Or a gasoline engine. They all have vibrations built into them. Absolutely. Just because of how they run. Yep. But that is a bad time to have your, your fuel tank or your fuel lines fail on you. Right. So it’s not a bad idea to replace those every year to every two years anyway.

Tom: Tigon fuel tubing is relatively cheap. Yeah.

Announcer: So, and it also gives you another reason to tinker with your airplane.

Ron: Yeah. And you don’t have to have a lot of it. I mean, it’s not like you’re buying six feet for an airplane. You’re under a foot for most of them.

Tom: Although you do have to be careful. You don’t want to buy too much Tigon. You buy just enough to do whatever project you work. Because I’ve discovered that, um, so a while back I bought, I think 12 feet or whatever. And I had all this Tigon tubing that I wasn’t using. And so I coiled it up and stuck it on my, on my little peg hook thing downstairs. And wouldn’t you know it, it stiffened up even just not being exposed to fuel.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: So. It still dries out. It still does. Yeah. So, you know, buy enough to do your project, but you really don’t need to stock up on 50 feet of Tigon tubing just because it’s on sale at loads.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: It doesn’t last all that long. Right. So. So, yeah, um, you know, there, um, a lot of folks that store their, their planes, you know, in a garage or out in a, in a shed or, you know, not even a trailer outside.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: Or yeah. And a trailer outside. We’ll, we’ll get to that. Um, but something that’s a very real thing here in the Midwest are mud daubers, which I don’t know if you don’t know what that is. It’s, it’s basically a wasp that builds a nest out of mud and they like to build their nests someplace cozy, someplace close and cramped. And I, I have seen this before where, uh, folks have stored their planes out on a garage and mud daubers have actually built their nest like in an exhaust outlet of a muffler or the carburetor of the engine, uh, or even if it’s in the airframe and you don’t see it. Well, first of all, it’s a nasty surprise when you go to start your airplane and all these wasps come out of it, but it’s also, you know, with vibration, you know, because we didn’t balance our propellers, it knocks these things loose. And then you got this mud dauber thing nest bouncing around or bouncing around inside the airframe and, you know, poking a hole in your covering or whatever. So check over the airframe and the engine and all the openings and stuff and make sure you don’t have something like that, especially if you store your airplane in a garage or

Ron: otherwise outside of the house. Yeah.

Tom: So, and then, uh, and then, yeah, the last thing kind of I’ll look over is the, is the condition of the covering. Um, you know, that’s, that’s kind of why I’m recovering the airplane over here. I noticed here at the end of last season that she wasn’t looking too pretty and there was a couple of seams that were coming loose and was fuel soaked underneath and it just couldn’t iron them down anymore. So that’s something you want to catch before you fly. Cause I can tell you a wing without covering doesn’t develop much lift.

Ron: No, it’ll, it’ll come off and you’ll have a crash for sure, which also can be checked or can be, uh, avoided by doing a proper pre-flight and checking it every year. So that’s right.

Tom: Yep.

Ron: Yeah. You, you kind of get out of it what you put into it. If you spend the time to make sure what you’re flying is correct, you won’t have the issues that you would if you don’t.

Tom: Yep. So that’s really about all I have. I mean, I’ll, I’ll go over all of those items on my, on my annual checkup and, uh, hope I don’t find any nasty surprises the first time I’m flying.

Ron: Yeah. Um, kind of going back to when we were talking about the trailers and you alluded to the, the issues. So that’s, uh, that’s on me. I won’t get into it too much, but, uh, just know that my trailer had, uh, a bit of a leak over the winter, come to find out, uh, that I didn’t catch in time. So I would say I lost probably three airplanes, uh, due to the wood swelling and warping, warping. They just, they don’t like to be wet. Um, one or two I could probably rebuild, but they weren’t ones I was all that excited about. So I don’t know if I will or not. I’ll probably just pull electronics off that I can save from it and go from there. So yeah, be careful with your, your trailers.

Tom: Yeah. Yeah. If you store, if you store anything in a trailer, um, especially through the summer months, um, at least here in the Midwest and anywhere else that there might happen to be humidity, um, check those things often to get in there and make sure. Cause that, I mean, the first sign is corroded hardware.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: You know, a lot of the hardware is steel on these things and steel, you know, turns to rust. So usually you can tell if you’re, if you’re in a, in a bad situation, the first thing you’ll notice is rusty hardware. There we go.

Ron: You know, lesson learned.

Tom: We spend so much time and energy and money on these things, you know, let’s do, do everything we can to take care of them.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: You’re right. Try to fly them for many, many years.

Ron: Make them last longer. Take care of them for your kids.

Tom: And you can do that by not crashing them and preventing crashes with a proper pre-flight.

Ron: Yeah. So everybody pre-flight check every single flight. Anything else?

Tom: No, I think that, I think that about covers it. Um, you know, we’ve gone over what, uh, what you should look for in a pre-flight check, you know, how to perform one. Um, Ron’s going to hopefully post a handy dandy checklist on the website.

Ron: Yeah. So check us out there and, uh, until next time, I’m Ron.

Tom: All right. And I’m Tom.

Ron: Thanks. Bye.

Tom: See you.

Announcer: Hope you enjoyed this episode of the RC Plane Lab podcast. For topic suggestions, to ask questions, or to give any feedback, connect with us at rcplanelab.com or email us direct at either ron at rcplanelab.com or tom at rcplanelab.com. You can also text us or leave us a voicemail at 818-351-9846. Please subscribe, rate, and review us on your favorite podcast app. Until next time, may your landings be gentle.

Announcer: a podcast for anyone interested in rc airplane we’ll share tips and tricks on how to build models and talk about successful flights epic crashes and everything in between visit us at rcplanelab.com to sign up for our email list and to ask us questions you can also text us or leave us a voicemail at 818-351-9846 please help us out by rating and reviewing us in your favorite podcast app thanks for spending time with us today now here are your hosts ron and tom hello everyone and

Ron: welcome to the rc plane lab podcast i’m ron i’m tom today is going to be just a short episode to kind of do or uh to kind of talk about what we’ve been up to in the last week with our uh our extra downtime what we’ve got accomplished and kind of what our next steps uh plan on being

Tom: so tommy you want to start us off yeah we’ll cover a little bit of what uh what’s going on in the shop down here i’ve got some more progress on the on the ho 229 project um boy what a complicated build this thing is uh trying to hinge these uh these freeze style um elevons has been a challenge um but i’m making you know making slow progress i can’t wait till it’s done how long do you think you have left at the rate i’m going i’ll need about six months off thanks to the coronavirus

Ron: oh man that’s a that’s a lot of time to put into one complicated yeah it’s a complicated build

Tom: um i still have you know i still have quite a bit of work to do on this panel and then i i still have the uh what will end up being the right hand panel uh to to finish up as well so it’s going to be it’s

Ron: going to be some time you said you’re only doing the wings too right the other other gentleman’s

Tom: taking care of the uh the fuselage right that was the uh that was the agreement um i’ve not seen the center section or the fuselage um up close yet uh so it’ll be uh it’ll be interesting when i go to mate the wings to the to the center section yeah have uh have you any or have you talked to him to find out how far along he is with stuff uh no he’s i think uh the last conversation i had with him he was uh pretty much as far as he could go on the fuselage uh until he had the wings and that’s when he sort of gave up the build and you know started uh poking club members to see if they

Ron: would finish it for him uh so i i think like finish the wing or finish oh i’m sorry so you mean he finished the fuselage before he gave you the wings yes oh i understand now okay yeah yeah i got it

Tom: yep so um i had to you know i had to pretty much construct the wings from you know from the beginning uh without having the center section with me um like i said it’ll it’ll be you know the real the real test will be when i go to to marry up the wing panels to the yeah center section

Ron: oh that’s gonna be scary it’s kind of hard when you don’t have all the pieces with you to make sure

Tom: everything you know lines up right when you’re doing it right and i i think that what the plan is once i once i get the right panel uh to you know to a point of completion um i’ll you know give him a call and i’ll take the wings with me to his house and because the center section is actually uh the reason i don’t have it with me is because number one uh it’s big and i have a fairly small workshop here to work out of so yeah um having it here i i didn’t want anything to happen to it while i was building the wings you don’t get knocked on the floor you know dog run over it or whatever so i just thought it was safer if it was at his house that way if anything happened to it it was on him yeah um but i think when when i get the other panel to the point where i’m gonna put them together i’ll just take them over there to his house kind of put them on there have a look at them and see how close they are and if they’re going to need a lot of work then i’ll have to figure out a way to get this intersection here and uh probably a lot of uh bondo and stuff like that before i

Ron: actually fiberglass the wings yeah it’ll be nice to get that done and kind of start on some of your

Tom: own stuff too you know well yeah and i’m i mean actually looking forward to seeing this thing completed because it is a really neat looking airplane i mean it’s going to have some really really cool features and you know it’s going to have retractable gear uh i think he’s built gear doors for it i’m not positive i’m hoping he has so that i don’t have to do it but it has uh you know it has uh elevons and then we’re doing split flaps so it has two flap sections per wing and uh one flap will go up and one flap will go down so essentially they’re speed brakes not really flaps yeah and then this thing has also got drag riders which are these little um deals that just kind of pop out of the upper and lower surface of the wing to act as rudders essentially they just cause drag on that particular wing to help control y’all it’s pretty neat yeah that’ll be

Ron: that’ll be pretty cool to see finish i can’t wait till it’s done yeah me too although that might be a

Tom: year down the road it’s hard to say well hopefully it’s not that long like you said i’ve i’ve got other stuff that i’d like to work on we’ve got an airplane that we’re gonna have to build right

Ron: yeah i’m looking forward to it i’m uh i’ve uh i’ve been looking online apparently there’s a lot of places are shut down and not shipping balsa um okay so that’s we’re just gonna have to kind of see how it goes actually i ordered uh i went on amazon because i needed some some batteries for this uh for this telemaster and yeah so i i bought the you know the six cell um did the battery packs the oh what are they called the the receiver packs receiver packs yep yeah they’re not supposed to be delivered until april 21st oh that’s unfortunate but i mean and they’re even they’re even in stock it says so i’m really i’m yeah i’m very surprised by that

Tom: yeah that that is surprising yeah although i can’t tell you how many times i’ve gotten stuff way before amazon said i was supposed to get it yeah that’s my hope because really i’m going to be

Ron: getting to a point where i’m finished with what i can do on this telemaster um yeah and i’m just gonna have to be moving on to something else i ended up getting all the the aileron and the flaps uh installed on both wings and i ended up getting the uh the servos all installed and got the all that hooked up so that’s pretty much ready to go you got the push rods all done yeah yeah those are all done i’m actually glad you left some ears over here because i had to use one of them okay i thought i had more and i i went to find what i had and i didn’t have what i was expecting so i don’t know what i ended up doing with them i actually think i might have used one uh might use one for a different use and i don’t remember what it was um unclog the toilet drain maybe no it wasn’t that but it was it was something out in the shop i remember i was working on last summer i needed something long to reach down into something i was like oh i’m just going to use that well i probably shouldn’t have because now i don’t have what i need but anyway um yeah i like i said i’m glad you left your your materials over here because i’ve scrounged through those a little bit

Tom: um well luckily i i did uh you know we had a hobby shop that uh closed here recently and um luckily i was able to take advantage of their you know store closing sale if you will and i did stock up on a lot of stuff like that the hardware and push rods and clevises and that sort of junk you just never seem

Ron: to have enough of that stuff yeah i probably should have but i didn’t and i’m i’m paying that price now actually i’m just stealing your stuff so i guess that works too well it worked out yeah well but i figured you brought that out for that plane so i’m not worried about it no that’s that’s why i brought it out there yep for us to use yeah but yeah so like i said i did get the the aileron flaps all all taken care of um that’s one thing that we did add on this airplane that wasn’t original to it was the flaps so i’ll be interested to see how that works yeah so they were just the the long ailerons on each on each wing but we ended up cutting those i’d say probably a third flap and then two thirds aileron yep yeah give or take uh so yeah it’ll be interesting to to fly that and see how that goes i’m looking forward to it one of the next things i have to do though yeah one of the next things i have to do though is mount the engine and i remember um so i have the standoffs on there but i don’t have the actual engine mounted and i remember talking to you about it before and you said something about some thrust or some angle thrust or whatever you call it thrust angle or something had to go on it right we’re going to add some right thrust so i guess i i don’t necessarily understand what all that means could you explain that to me and maybe there’s some people listening that don’t uh don’t understand that either yeah sure uh so most airplanes have

Tom: have some amount of thrust um built into their engine mounting um and and what that means is you know that if you were to draw a line right down the center line of the crankshaft and line that up parallel to the center line of the airplane you would have zero degrees of thrust meaning that your thrust was is being applied uh 100 in line with the center line of the airplane um most airplanes uh right thrust is fairly common anywhere from one to one to three one to four degrees something like that um and the reason for that is uh these engines especially the the you know the nitros and gassers they produce torque and that tends to yaw the airplane to the left so by adding some right thrust to the engine mounting um it sort of counteracts that left thrust tendency so the airplane flies in a straight line oh okay i get it then that makes sense yep yeah so we’ll put a you know we’ll put a couple of degrees of right thrust on that thing maybe a degree of down thrust because that airplane’s got so much wing it’s gonna have a lot of lift and it also has lifting tail right has an airfoil stabilizer so uh we may add a couple of the you know then that’s something that’s really easy to to tinker with by just adding washers under the

Ron: under the mounts okay well then one of the other things i was going to be doing on it was was kind of measuring up and and printing like 3d printing uh cowl but i think i might think that’d be cool yeah but i think i might end up wait or waiting to do that until we have the motor mount done okay um and correct that way wise yeah because i mean two degrees on a motor that’s or on an engine that’s that long is going to make quite a bit of a difference on where it actually

Tom: ends up right and you don’t want to create a cowl that you know that’s not going to line up with the

Ron: spinner in its final location no right yeah so i’ll probably wait and do that but no that’ll be good to get that done too so hopefully if we ever get out of this you know lockdown which this lockdown is kind of weird to me because i still have to go to work and apparently like everybody else does too because i do not notice any difference whatsoever in traffic when i go to work and when

Tom: i come home i mean it almost seems like you should say that because uh laurie and i uh this evening laurie is my wife by the way um yeah i know we went to well the reason our listeners may not know yeah i i got it but uh we went to uh and picked up dinner at a restaurant tonight and brought a home and usually uh this particular restaurant um is on the west side of town where there’s always traffic and tonight it was like it was like a ghost town it was really really kind of strange so i understand what you’re saying about it you know your your commute to work and home probably kind of looks similar but any other like extraneous or extra traveling people just aren’t doing it and it’s really it’s really kind of eerie almost well yeah that’s interesting because there’s still you know a

Ron: lot of traffic out by where we live um but i guess i i guess the road we’re close to is is fairly main country road um connecting a couple towns but maybe that’s why there’s a lot of traffic going by but yeah i haven’t noticed any difference now i haven’t been out obviously last weekend or in the evenings uh so i haven’t seen any differences in there because i’m not out but yeah just going to work and coming home i mean there is a ton of people out yeah so that’s just odd it is it is odd

Tom: and and but i mean you know getting back to what you said we’ll we’ll you know eventually we’ll get through this and we’ll be able to to do those things that we want to do yeah no i i get it it’s

Ron: just uh yeah we’ll have to see what the next step is because i i don’t know if this is going to be enough to uh to get the result we need at this point yet yeah but anyway yeah it’s not worth worrying about it we’ll see what happens and move on from there you know yeah you could waste a lot of time worrying about it yeah and so changing topics a little bit you know we were talking about that other airplane that we were going to build the ford tri-motor the tri-motor yeah so one of the things i was thinking and i wanted to get your input on it before i spent a lot of time trying to figure it out 3d printing the wing spars or not the spars the wing ribs what do you think of that

Tom: so obviously you’d be printing them out of plastic right um i mean i i i’m not opposed to that um i think probably i mean i’m not sure how much i so i’ve never actually seen a finished uh 3d printed uh product that is like ready for use right off the printer meaning like i’m assuming that a wing

Ron: rib is probably going to have kind of a rough finish probably um so like the the outside part where you’d actually put your covering would be smoother than like the finish on the top and bottom not that it’s going to be bad um but it’s you’re gonna it’s going to have a little bit of texture to

Tom: it now that can be so here’s that can be sanded down right here’s why that’s important like so if you if you you know if you if you’re looking down edgewise at a rib okay so flip it 90 degrees so now you’re looking at the at the face if you will yeah um a plastic rib compared to a balsa or you know some other hardwood rib i’m not sure what sort of structural qualities it has so because i would be unsure i would want to laminate that with something um carbon fiber veil or fiberglass or whatever um and that would require a smooth surface or a somewhat smooth surface to actually bond to

Ron: um oh okay well i tell you what why don’t i why don’t i try and print one okay and then maybe i can either send it to you or drop it on your porch or something yeah one day i would like that kind of look at it so maybe i can work on maybe i can work on doing that this weekend or next weekend we’ll just kind of see how time goes but yeah i’ll give you the the final say in that because if so i mean that’s a lot easier uh oh heck yeah you know a lot easier to do because i can just do that on the computer and then it can print while i’m at work even it doesn’t matter yeah yeah that uh i mean if

Tom: something like that would would work um man that would be a real time saver number one um but i mean there’s there’s something to be said with with working with wood too

Ron: yeah yeah i understand i that’s cool but i kind of like i’m old school yeah and i i like the newer stuff so i kind of like having the the ability to kind of a 3d kind of a cool blend of old and new

Tom: you know 3d printed ribs if those would work out with uh you know basswood spars and balsa sheeting and i don’t know it might be a cool blend of old and new yeah maybe it’s already been done out there

Ron: maybe i’ll have to google search it yeah it’s a good idea i was just thinking about that at work today and i was like oh i’m gonna i’m gonna ask him about that and see what he thinks so i guess i can get on there too and see because i’m sure i’m not the first person that thought about it i mean probably not i’m sure it’s been done that we’ll probably either find out that yeah it’s a decent idea or don’t do it because of this so right but yeah we’ll look into it and see what happens yeah um other thing i wanted to bring up before we we sign off for the night um okay so we did have uh a listener comment on the uh as3x receivers that we talked about in our last episode oh okay um so he reached out and wants to remain anonymous which is fine so we won’t name names um but he said that uh the as3x receivers cannot be installed with velcro he just wanted to make that clear that everybody knew it so according to what he was told and i’m i’m assuming this is correct because it kind of makes a little bit of sense but maybe you can tell me if i’m wrong um so he said that uh he was told the the velcro does not isolate the receiver enough from vibrations from the airframe and it can kind of uh uh amplify them a little bit i guess to where it doesn’t actually match exactly what the airplane is doing um so he said he actually crashed an airplane and then when he went to put the new uh the new body on the new fuselage on he put all the electronics in it and used velcro on on that time uh when he did it and then he crashed as soon as he took off he said it just did some weird stuff um and then when he talked to the the hobby shop that he was dealing with with it that’s what they told him um that you have to put it with uh servo tape or with some some double-sided tape instead of the velcro hmm so what are your thoughts on that um well

Tom: i mean i’ve i’ve not dealt with as3x um very much myself um because i i’m kind of at a point in my flying where i don’t feel like i want it or or need it even because it as3x is is you know like we discussed before is a tool right right um sort of like the safe technologies but you know not not getting into that um i i gotta say that i i’ve mounted receivers both ways in fact i’ve mounted receivers lots of different ways um and i’ve never had any problems with standard receivers and velcro in fact the the receiver that is in the stick project in your basement there that we’ve been working on is mounted with velcro and i’ve never had an issue with it yeah i i usually use velcro on

Ron: them too just because if you’re if you’re going to change out any servos or anything it’s easier to just be able to pull that out with velcro you know plug things in and plug things as you need to

Tom: yeah especially if you’re yeah if you’re you know swapping between airframes and things like that it’s convenient but with the as3x um i i would have to i would have to say that i guess i guess i have i kind of have two ways of thinking about it so number one um it seems like uh the velcro at least the velcro that i use um it it does a a pretty good job of cushioning uh of isolating um the component that you’re using it you know to mount uh does a pretty good job of isolating it from vibration because the velcro that i use has you know the the firm side and the soft side i mean you stick them both together it’s a pretty soft you know there is room for movement which leads me to number two which you know since this thing has built in gyros any kind of movement in that receiver is probably going to send wonky signals to those gyros that are mounted internally yeah so i i’d say there’s probably a lot of merit um to the to the comment that uh our listener um heard from the hobby shop um i would say i would probably agree you probably want to mount your as3x receiver somewhat solidly at least so that it can’t move around i’m a huge fan of shoo goo like i don’t know if you know what that is or not um but if it if i know i’m going to put this component in an airplane for a really long time i’ll just go ahead and shoo goo it and shoo goo is wonderful it oh really oh it absorbs um it absorbs impact it absorbs vibration um and it’ll you know someday if you need to pull the receiver or what have you i’ve mounted servos with this stuff um it’s it’s time consuming and you have to be patient you know because you have to wait for it to cure and make sure nothing moves you know when it’s when when the glue is still wet but uh once it’s once it’s done man it’s very very solidly mounted um with all with also those uh sound deadening vibration absorbing qualities but it will also release it’s it’s it’s tougher to get it to release than servo tape but it will release and it releases clean which i like oh that is interesting i’ve never used that before yeah used to use it all the time on cars rc cars i always just use double-sided tape well i tend to to crash a lot so double-sided tape would sometimes let me down well right right right yeah so double-sided tape would let me down sometimes yeah that happened to me quite a bit

Ron: too but i mean we never raced raced it was all just kind of you know we we had a track out in our front uh our front pasture and when we used to do rc cars it had probably a oh i’d say probably 120 foot long straight away i would think something in that range and uh it was pretty big i remember yeah it was a lot of fun had some jumps and stuff on it but anyway there were several times that yeah you’d you’d pull in you know have to run a couple laps and you’d have to take your car off the road or off the the dirt and and re uh double side tape the the receiver down because it’s or the esc even neither one of those because they’re just kind of bouncing around yeah so yeah i can see where that would be an issue but you you get a lot more vibrations and stuff with cars than you do with

Tom: planes yeah so yeah and and i never had you know knock on wood i’ve never had an issue with a receiver that i’ve that i’ve mounted that way having said that i will say that you know to a to our listener who might might be listening to this episode that brought the question i would say that i agree uh you should probably not mount as3x receivers with velcro i think that’s probably uh probably a wise uh wise person that told him that the other thing with as3x2 though is i’m i’m pretty

Ron: sure that you have to mount the uh the receiver in the same position every time oh yeah that’s

Tom: extremely important in fact when you when you get the receiver um there’s usually fairly explicit directions on how to mount that receiver because it’s extremely important to mount that receiver in

Ron: correct direction yeah or else it’s really going to get messed up when you when you’re pitching or

Tom: rolling or whatever you’re doing like i installed a uh an as3x receiver for one of our club members in a i think it was an edge or something like that a little foamy and uh i think it was a spectrum receiver and i think it said that there was one of four maybe five positions that you could mount the receiver in such that it would work correctly and anything other than that would be would give you unsatisfactory performance which also means crash exactly wow okay yeah anything unsatisfactory with rc airplanes is usually going to end up in a crash yeah so be on the watch out for it i guess so

Ron: yeah make sure you always read the directions with anything you get i mean that’s that’s the number one thing so it will always tell you best practices and you know how to mount things how to

Tom: yeah a lot of a lot of development goes into these products and that’s all reflected on those

Ron: instructions that you get inside the box yep so all right well good deal do you uh have anything else

Tom: you want to cover cool no i uh i dug around the the shop here a couple days ago looking for a big four stroke to put on the stick and couldn’t find anything so looks like i’m going to stick that

Ron: ugly blue la 61 i’m back on there uh what about uh don’t you have one of those uh sato golden knights do you have that on something yes it’s not big enough oh it’s not big enough oh i thought yeah i thought isn’t it uh i thought it was like a 80 size or 82 or something it’s a 72 72 yeah i mean it would fly the

Tom: stick but not not the way i like to fly it all right well keep looking maybe you’ll find something else yeah you never know it’s yeah that’s uh that’s that’s all i got yeah well me too so i guess until

Ron: next time thanks for listening to everybody and uh we’ll talk to you later all right we’ll see you

Announcer: guys bye hope you enjoyed this episode of the rc plane lab podcast for topic suggestions to ask questions or to give anything back connect with us at rcplane lab.com or email us direct at either ron at rcplane lab.com or tom at rcplane lab.com you can also text us or leave us a voicemail at 818-351-9846 please subscribe rate and review us on your favorite podcast app until next time may your landings be gentle