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Announcer: RC Plane Lab is a podcast for anyone interested in RC airplanes. We share tips and tricks for building models and talk about successful flights, epic crashes, and everything in between. Visit RCPlaneLab.com to join our email list and ask questions. You can also text us or leave a voicemail at 818-351-9846. Please rate and review 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 the RC Plane Lab podcast. This is Ron and Tom. Today we’re sharing updates on what we’ve worked on and accomplished during the past week. First, I had a chance to 3D-print some wing ribs—an experiment we mentioned in an earlier episode. I printed the ribs and took them to Tom for his opinion.

Tom: To look at and, what did you think of them. Well overall I gotta say, structurally speaking these things are really really stiff I would have no no problems whatsoever with, you know assembling a wing out of these, a first impression though honestly was it, it was a little heavy,. But granted there are no lightning holes it’s just a solid you know rib with this weird little doohickey.

Ron: You put in the middle of it what was that about, that that was, not a doohickey I put in the middle that was actually a rib I think that was a center rib off of, the ford tri motor plans that we were talking about doing. Okay and if I remember right I think that was I think that’s where the.

Tom: Servo goes for the engine I think oh I could be wrong. Okay you’re talking about the cut I’m talking about this weird octagonal interlocking puzzle piece looking thing you put in the middle why’d you do.

Ron: That okay so that one, I have a small 3D printer it’s not huge, and that was actually that was actually a pretty big wing rib if you look it’s probably what 12 inches it’s. Yeah it’s, maybe 14 it’s a 10 and a quarter. Okay so I was way off but anyway, 10 and a quarter inches. Well you know this is six inches right it was a little wider than what I can do on the, on my on my printer. So what I had to do is split that in half and that was kind of like a little puzzle piece to where you. Can and can glue that together, okay so yeah I understand it was heavy,? Yeah there was there was no there was no light there was no lighting hole or lightning holes or anything that I put in, right you know if we wanted to continue and try it again, I can work on, lightening it up a little bit I can put,, I mean I can just do an outline let me ask you this fillers. Okay can it be.

Tom: Printed thinner I mean this is this is fairly what is this 3 16 or. So yeah it was supposed to.

Ron: Be 3 16 according to the plan it was oh. Okay okay yeah the the original plan said, 3 16 balsa. So I just went with the same thickness, so that’s the reason that was. So thick what, I know there are some thinner wing ribs and stuff that are probably what eighth inches is fairly common I think eighth.

Tom: Inch is usually yeah eighth inch 332 depending on the on the airframe for the sport type stuff that you know that I fly it’s it’s usually eighth inch balsa. Yeah and I mean you can print whatever.

Ron: Thickness you want it just has to do with how you design it, I just went with whatever was was on the on the plans on that one, I gotcha. So yeah maybe if you want to revisit that I can do another one and and lighten it up a little bit make it a little bit thinner and and maybe find a smaller, a smaller rib to try and just do a single piece what do you think of that. Yeah I think,.

Tom: I think I’d like that, did it take long to print. Yeah that was what I was going to say that’s the.

Ron: Problem with it though it, I think that one took about three hours to print,. Okay so you’re not. Okay so the the good and the bad with that it took three hours to print. But I don’t necessarily care that it took three hours to print. Because I’m not working on it for three hours that’s true, the only you know you can you can set it to print and. Then go to bed or you can set it print and. Then walk away and do whatever you need to do and. Then just come back and and start over next time for another one, and that’s pretty easy to do. But there is quite a bit of time in it the nice thing about it though is it’s fairly cheap, I think if I did the math right that was about 14 cents is all it costs to. Do that one, okay I don’t know I don’t know how that compares price-wise to like balsa,? But if we’re if we’re going to be thinning it out too you know it’s not going to be first off it won’t take nearly that long to print, it’s not going to be as much material. So it won’t be as expensive, and if we lighten it up too, even with with holes or with or with whatever else we can put in there,. Then that’s really gonna speed it up also, well I mean a couple of things that come to mind.

Tom: Just just kind of looking at this and thinking about the differences between this and balsa,. Yeah definitely cheaper than balsa I think, I think a, an eighth inch by, let’s just say three inch by 36 inch sheet of balsa is probably depending on where you get it from you know let’s just say it’s let’s just say it’s three bucks for a sheet it’s probably less than that. But, with shipping and everything it’ll just call three bucks and you could probably lay out, I’m thinking. You could probably lay out maybe eight of these, if you you know strategically place them on the sheet. So yeah definitely definitely cheaper than than a sheet of balsa and another thing I’ll mention is that, I think probably less waste I mean we usually end up when we start cutting parts out of balsa sheets we you know there’s no matter how good you are or efficient you are at laying out parts there’s always going to be some waste of that of that really expensive balsa. So yeah there’s there’s.

Ron: Not a lot of waste yeah no waste when you do that and that that does make it nice,. So that’s I’d say.

Tom: That’s a that’s a pretty, a positive feature but you know honestly for for me I mean I’m looking at this and it does look like there’s going to be you know some cleanup you know you’re going to have to do some sanding here where the where the two, pieces of this particular rib made up,. Because it looks like there’s a little bit of a mismatch here on the on the on what would be the top surface it’s not a big mismatch. But if you you know you lay a sheet of balsa over it like our you know like a wing skin, it would create a hump in the skin. So you’d have to sand that down and, for for me. It’s not that I’m made of money or anything like that. But I think I would probably spend less time. Cutting cutting this out of balsa and getting you know probably less time involved with the cleanup than than with this plastic one and for me, the the value of time is, you know I don’t want to say time is worth more than money. But in my case I don’t have a lot of time to spare. So you know if I can if I can do something a little bit quicker usually I don’t mind paying a little bit more is kind of what I’m saying. Okay so don’t do it again do it again but no I’m I would like to. No no I would like to see one of these done an eighth inch with maybe some lightning holes and let’s see, you know I’ll compare it to a you know I’ll pull a I’ll pull a rib out of one of these kits I got. We’ll kind of compare them weight wise, but really I mean if if we could get this and make it work I have no problems no problems using using these in a wing. Because they are plenty strong that’s for sure I mean I’m trying to to break this thing and it’s it’s resisting way more than a piece of balsa wood. Yeah okay and there’s no grain to this too which is another you know interesting point. Because this is probably going to have strength the same strength in all directions you know both torsually and sheer strength and you know bend strength you know balsa has strength. But usually and you know has more strength in one direction than the other. So a nice thing about this is you don’t have to do a lot of planning with you know with grain and and trying to figure that into your design which that’s kind of handy that could save some time. Yeah okay well we’ll try that yeah I’d.

Ron: Like to see another one in eighth inch try it. Okay I’ll I’ll do that and see if we can get to it this week, if not it’ll be next week I don’t know and I’m not sure what this week is going to bring yet. So we’ll see, yeah it’s hard to hard to plan right? Now yeah, so one of the other things we, we talked about before is we were going to build, ford tri-motor, we were both excited about it and we still are however yes,. Yeah so we’ve kind of talked and I think we’re going to push that. You know maybe next plane and, I think we’re going to do, duelists. So since you know Tom talked about his, his or in one of the episodes talked about him crashing his duelist, several years ago and he was a little sad about it and I don’t know if he’s gotten over it yet. But maybe, I mean it’s.

Tom: Been a long time ago but yeah I learned a valuable lesson you know those pre-flies are very important.

Ron: Right so we’ll, I I okay so I was just killing time looking on online surfing the internet and I came across plans for a duelist, I don’t know anything about them other than apparently there’s a few different plans I think two or three different ones I found, and. So that kind of piqued my interest and I said hey Tom let’s let’s do this instead let’s you know let’s go with this plane it should be a little bit easier to do you you know what you’re working on you’ve kind of had one. So before and I’m really excited to be honest yeah and for for a first, scratch build slash plan. Build whatever whatever you want to call it it, it would be exciting for me to do too. Because after seeing that plane I really think it’s a nice looking plane it’s very sexy it is it’s it’s very sleek and long and I I think one of the things I like about it too is that the nacelles actually stick out as far as the as the nose,. Yep most planes don’t do that when you see you know like the dual motor planes and stuff that’s kind of stuck or sucked back a little bit and I I I really like the the look of it, right? So yeah what we did, I went ahead and I printed the plans. I have I’m I’m fortunate enough to have a wide format printer here. So, right I printed the 69 which is awesome yeah it it does it does make it easy,. So I printed the 69 inch plans, and apparently those are the ones you wanted. But you wanted me to print another set also, so one of I want to say to you is anybody listening I don’t want to have the printer just for myself if you. Guys need to print anything or want any any plans printed or something like that email me,. We’ll hook you up we’ll get you set up it’s it’s not a big deal to print, I think the widest paper I have right? Now is 42 inch so as long as your plans are less than that drop me an email. We’ll we’ll figure something out if you need something printed. We’ll we’ll get you taken care of and for anybody.

Tom: Listening, I have no skin in his print game okay,. But having now seen the plans you know they’re right here in my in my shop here in the basement, having seen them up close I I gotta tell you they’re they’re very very high quality I mean they’re as good as any plans I’ve seen printed.

Ron: Yeah it’s, it’s a very nice printer, so and it really getting off topic. But right where that printer stands out and you’ve seen them when I have like the the high quality photos and stuff that can be printed on that oh it’s it’s gorgeous, it really is. But anyway yeah if anybody needs print or plans printed or anything like that just drop me an email. We’ll we’ll figure something out I’m I’m you know I’m not trying to make a bunch of money or do anything with it we’re just trying to help everybody out here. So, if you need something let me know so back to these these plans. I was, okay I was very intrigued by the story you told me, behind these plans. So okay so first thing when I when I said that I found, a set of plans for this plane and wanted to print them and wanted to give them to you and and try to build it you you told me when I when I showed you which ones they were that that’s fine,. But there are some errors in those plans and when I ask you how you knew you of course wouldn’t tell me you’re just like oh it’s magic or whatever,. But anyway. So there’s a an interesting story behind these plans so would you fill everybody else in kind.

Tom: Of on how this whole thing went sure yeah I’ll try to I’ll try to not butcher it up. So the dualist was originally designed by dave platt, for anybody that’s been flying for a while you you’ve heard the name I’m sure, was an airplane designer he designed the dualist I think it was 70 I’m gonna say 74 let’s just say, it’s probably plus or minus a year or two. But anyway, dave platt had his own company, at one time it was dave platt models and, he produced this airplane, under his dave. Platt models brand and he had a business partner, and you know sometime after the they produced the dualist and a few other their of their kits, he and his business partner had a falling out and, he actually got kind of booted out of his own company that company continued on for a while and, dave platt of course went on to to,, form pika models, and a lot of those pika. Well I think all of those pika designs are actually a dave platt and dave platt collaboration with other. Designers, but anyway dave platt models once dave was gone continued to produce the dualist and it was a, a 67 inch wing, and it was there was a few weird things about it. But it was a very very, good flying airplane had some weird, thrust angles built into the engines and I think there was a weird, negative I think incidents on on where the wing was mounted in relation to the you know to the horizontal data, at any rate dave platt when he left that company and formed pika models. He redesigned the dualist called it a mark ii, he elongated the wings made it easier to build by refining a few things on the print and. Then the kits, his kits were all built with, at least his dualist kits were built with no right thrust no down thrust everything was mounted straight up including the wing and the tail. So it was an easier airplane to build from a kit and also an easier airplane to build from the plans,. So there’s two sets of plans out there for the dual for the 40 size. I’ll say dualist, there’s the 67 inch wing which is the original and. Then there’s the 69 inch wing which was the redesigned by dave platt. So that he could sell it under pika models, so,. Now we have thanks to your printer we have a copy of both plans, and I’m going to stick with the 69 inch, version. Because it’s going to be a little bit easier to build don’t have to worry too much about the incidence angles as long as we set everything up at zero and, the nice thing about the the the. Original plan though is that the the wing ribs are a little bit more clear and, there’s another separate plan that has all the rib templates out, separately unfortunately the 69 inch plan that we’re going to use or that I’m going to use, all the rib templates are kind of stacked on top of each other on the plan to save space it makes them difficult to draw that way. But we’ll work around it and as far as the errors are concerned,. So on the 69 inch wing I’m not sure if it’s. Because of the way it was printed originally or if it was if it was it’s definitely not a design, dave platt. Didn’t design it this way but the left wing panel is actually on the plan is it the left one one of the wing panels is shorter by just a little bit than the other one I think the difference is like five sixteenths I think overall. So that’s one one error on the plan that, it’s pretty easy to fix. But we’ll.

Ron: You know we’ll work around it so what do you just kind of flip the plan over and and and print it. Then.

Tom: Or you you can you can do it lots of different ways, to to save paper I’ve done this before,. So you build let’s say you want to build the left panel first and. Then if you want to build a right panel just. Exactly like it you flip the plan over rub some transmission fluid on the plan and guess what presto change of the lines all transferred to the other side and. Now you’ve got a reverse image of the of the other and you build on that’s a good idea that’s. Yeah that’s one way to do it or you know if you got a nice fancy printer you can just print the plan twice and flip it over and do that. I mean or probably what I’ll end up doing is I’ll just I’ll just fudge each rib on the other panel to make it the same width as the as the panel on the other side pretty easy fix honestly cool. Yeah.

Ron: We’ll try that, I’m I’m guessing if if that’s the one you’re sticking with and I end up doing my own, I will probably also stick with that same kit. Yeah, yeah it’ll be easier with that same plan yeah, and I just. Okay yeah no go ahead I was gonna say so my my question. Then you know I’m an electric guy how hard would this be to to go with electric probably pretty easy very easy. Yep okay?

Tom: Very easy, the the airplane, if I remember correctly, my original dualist I think it was somewhere in the 10 and a half to 11 pound range. So you take off the take off the nitro motors and all the stuff with with that’s involved with those, of course you’re going to be replacing those with with fairly substantial battery packs,. But I think you could probably do if you’re really really really careful about building it and you’re and you’re really conscientious about weight, I think. You could probably build an electric version maybe even a pound or. So maybe more lighter than that, but I think it would make and if you decided you didn’t want to do retractable gear you just wanted to put standard gear in it,. Then it would be even lighter still so I think it would make a great.

Ron: Electric conversion yeah because I just I just pulled up the model or the the plans while we were talking and it says it’s for two, 25 to 40 engines that sounds pretty small you know I think an electric motor you could probably run that off, like a 3s lipo or something even. Yeah each for.

Tom: Each one yeah absolutely yeah yeah you wouldn’t get you may not get you know you may not get the flight time. But, yeah you could you could certainly certainly run each motor on this particular airplane on a 3 cell I don’t see any problem with that 4 cell would be better. Yeah but well we’ll play it by ear.

Ron: We’ll see how that goes but yeah if we do it, you know I I know you’ll be building your kit I would like to also build one. But we’ll see what time does, yeah I mean we’ve got some projects to.

Tom: Finish first too which you know speaking of projects we’ll. We’ll talk about that yeah, but yeah.

Ron: We’ll we’ll we’ll this is probably what we’re going to be doing. So well as of now that’s I think what we’re gonna what we’re gonna say,. Yeah you’re gonna be excited you’re gonna be looking up, balsa making a list on how much it’s gonna be, you know what we need to get, let me know.

Tom: Actually I actually almost have the list together now I’m I got a few things I need to put on there and. Then I’ll I’ll put an order together and see how much it is I’m just going to order enough to do.

Ron: Two so that’ll be that well let me know what it comes to. Because we might double that because it’s always good to have some. Well it’s always good to have some balsa and stuff around the house. Anyway. So I’m I’m I’m getting very low on supplies, I noticed that when I was kind of going through trying to do some stuff on the, on the, telemaster. So I need to stock back up so I have.

Tom: Some stuff sitting here okay yeah we’ll, yeah once I once I get a list together and I get an order together I’ll I’ll, I’ll hit you up and let you know what it is and if you want to double it we will.

Ron: Okay good deal, I’m really excited yeah it’ll be fun I I AM good to have a twin again it’ll be fun to see, what colors you go with versus like what I would do that’s what I’m more yours is going to definitely look like a 70s airplane and I think mine would be more, mine would be more modern.

Tom: I do I do like the the 70s pattern themes I’m I wouldn’t say I’m stuck in the 70s. But.

Ron: Yeah I like them, you might be that’s probably back when you had hair isn’t it.

Tom: Well I used to have hair yeah I mean yeah back in the 70s.

Ron: So I speaking a senior telemaster I got some stuff done on that one,. Yeah I’m pretty much I don’t want to say finished. Because I still have a few things to do but the the hard part is definitely behind me, I did take it outside today and ran it and got it tuned. So that motor is that motor yeah that motor is back to working, sweet. So did you take a video please tell me you took a video I did not,. So I I wanted to talk to you about the motor that’s on there. Okay how how. Overkill is that and should I be using it or should I be looking for a different motor.

Tom: It’s I mean I’ll be honest it’s it’s probably going to be, flying that thing around a quarter throttle most of the time probably, that the reason that the reason I suggested it, I knew it was going to be too much motor I mean I knew that. But I also knew that it was going to need a substantial amount of weight in the nose to to get the thing to balance. Because of that really really really long tail, so I thought. Well rather than add just a bunch of useless lead why not. You know put some motor up there it’s not going to hurt anything I mean that that firewall is super super strong or at least it was, we’ve put a few holes in it. Now haven’t we yeah I had to okay unfortunately yeah. Well that’s okay I mean if you if you want to if you want to remoter it with something else I mean I have a shelf of engines up here that you know we could we could probably you know make work. But I it is going to be it is going to be much more power than it needs.

Ron: Well I and I only probably had so I put a 16 by 6 prop on it and. Okay that’s pretty small for that motor well I can’t fit anything bigger on it. Because if I went up no clearance yeah if I went up to like an 18 and you hold it straight out you’re going to be hitting the grass and and. Okay even like with this one if you tip that tail up just a little bit too much you’re you’re really close to the ground too close for for my comfort. Okay, I mean that thing was originally designed to fly on a 40. Right that’s if it’s designed to fly on that and this is a 30 or 32 cc whatever gasser right, it’s it’s a lot of motor,. So even even with the prop that size which is apparently small for that, for that engine. Yeah it, it throttle or it, at idle it really wanted to roll like I had it tied to the golf cart. So it wasn’t taking off on me and going anywhere. And you know I tried to tune it down and get it and get it running. Well, and it just it did not want to, didn’t want to stay there. So that’s that’s my only concern did you take an rpm reading.

Tom: Did you put a tack on it to see where it was idling no I didn’t I kind of ran out of time?

Ron: Tonight I was it was excited to get out and get it done you know I wanted to hear it run see if it would work and stuff and. So I I you know I had enough time to do that,. But no I didn’t take in any, any rpm it sounded good, like I said it needed a lot of adjustment on the needles. Because it was running really rough at first but once I got that tuned a little bit better,. Yeah it was.

Tom: Running pretty good sounded good yeah well maybe you know maybe. We’ll take that off of there and we’ll save that maybe for for you know a bigger project down the road and, maybe maybe. We’ll compromise and we’ll put like a I’ve got a 90 I think it’s a 91 two-stroke up here probably be just perfect for that, 91 is going to turn a 14 inch prop. So you’ll get more ground clearance.

Ron: Yeah and that might that might, might work a little bit better for it. But we’ll we’ll see.

Tom: Yeah when all this when this covid thing is all over I’ll, I’ll package it up and I’ll bring it out next time we come out. We’ll kind of look at it and you know maybe we could invert it and put a nice clean cowl on it 3D print. Yeah or something yeah that would be nice the cowl that I have to make.

Ron: For this or that I would have to make for this is is going to be huge I mean it’s like from, from the inside of the propeller to the the actual firewall I mean you’re close to eight eight and a half inches I think. So you know that’s, that’s a lot to make up with a that’s a lot of cowl. Yeah yeah so I don’t know we’ll see once, I said once all this is done and and you come out. Then we’ll we’ll do a little bit more with it and. Now I did find it funny too though that since this the last episode we were talking about receivers and we kind of warned about feedback with, gas motors. Yeah this. Has a lot of feedback and, we’re gonna have to do some some figuring out on that? So every time I went full throttle so my plan actually was to take it and untie it from the golf cart. So that I could actually you know kind of taxi it around the the, the yard and stuff I didn’t have wings on it. Okay but I wanted to be able to taxi it around the yard and stuff just kind of you know see how it how it behaved. But I I couldn’t do that because anytime I went to like half to full throttle for some reason the, the elevator went completely up and the rudder went completely right? Oh yeah that’s not yeah not good at all so as soon as I saw that I was like all right? Well I’m not going to taxi it around or do anything. But I’m yeah I will you know I will run it up and make sure it’s running right,. So I don’t know if it was you know I don’t have anything installed in there yet and it was all just kind of thrown inside the fuselage. So, yeah there might be a little.

Tom: Spektrum is usually pretty good you know about about noise and and rf noise and things like that, you know I’ll be honest when I converted that engine I never actually put it in an airplane I only ever bench ran it and, I mean you’ve seen the video of it that I had on youtube for the longest time. But, yeah if I recall there’s a lot of well in most of these big gas two strokes you know they they do vibrate a lot and they do cause a lot of noise. But yeah if it’s if it’s causing causing you. Know servos to to go full lock like that then. Yeah we definitely would want to investigate that before.

Ron: You risk flying it that’s for sure yeah absolutely and it’s I mean it’s it has everything to do with the running of the motor. Because when the motor would died or when it was off you know going full throttle and all that didn’t change it at all. So when I first saw it I thought well maybe there was a mix in there something with throttle you know somehow, you know a mix with throttle and. Then the other the control surfaces but I was like no way that this is a fresh fresh bind and a fresh model. So that that should not be in there, and then as soon as it was turned off it stopped. So I was. Like okay so it had nothing to do with that it’s feedback we’re done pretty much with with working on it for today. But it is you know it is all together it’s running,. So that’s a plus I did you know we we talked about putting a choke out the front, I could not find any way to to run any sort of, wire out like the front, of a cowl. So I did have to put that on a on a servo oh. Okay that was I mean that’s okay yeah it worked. Okay I I hated losing another channel to that. But there’s just no way there’s no way oh you you mean you ran out of slots on your receiver. Not yet I think I still have one more but I would like to have a couple extras just in case. Okay but yeah so that that’s where I stand on on on that. So yeah when all this does down you can come out and. We’ll look at it and try and figure some stuff out. We’ll look into that. About, any other progress, yeah so my oldest one oh. Well I’m gonna go ahead and try and draw this out a little bit. Then, fair enough I mean not not too much, my oldest kid was talking about wanting to kind of get back into flying and learn to fly a little bit one of his friends wants to oh. Yeah that’s right so I’ve got to go through I have a, an airplane here that hasn’t been touched for several years it’s an old trainer, I don’t remember what it is. But it’s a habaco. Something or another, so I’m gonna have to go through that and and kind of make sure it’s working, the motor on it is it’s a, it’s a nitro motor. But it’s very tight I mean it still spins.

Tom: So is that something I need to worry about or. But maybe, but maybe not if it’s been sitting a while more than likely it’s just gummed up from the the oil that was in the fuel that was probably in it, probably my guess is somebody didn’t put, you know a proper after run oil in the motor, which. We’ll talk about in one of our other episodes but, probably it’s. Okay, it was just probably put away with fuel still in the engine and. Then that fuel the oil that was in it congealed. And it tends to stick parts together when it varnishes. But it’ll come it’ll come clean I’m fairly.

Ron: Confident as you’re running it’ll kind of work itself out. Then yep yeah once you once you fuel.

Tom: It up for the first time you know we’ll pull the plug out of it,. We’ll fuel it up put a little squirt a little fuel on top of the cylinder and, as you turn it over that fuel will sort of dissolve if you will and loosen up that old varnish and and oil and, once that once that loosens up. Yeah you’ll you’ll get some lubrication to the bearings and, it should be it should be.

Ron: Fine I I bet I bet it’s fine okay well that’s good news. Then I won’t have to worry about that, yeah so I I know I’m gonna have to put some packaging tape and stuff on the wings there’s a few holes in it,. Yeah this is one of those this is one of those ugly planes that really is a trainer and if anything happens to it you’re just like eh you know no big deal it’s it’s not a, it’s not going to win any beauty contest or anything. But it’ll do what it needs to do and and hopefully it’ll serve it’s purpose. Yeah hopefully get both of them in the air and and hooked on the. On the hobby kind of like we are, yeah I hope. So other things he’s flown before though yeah it’s been several years he hasn’t, he hasn’t been into it for several years. But I think he’s he’s kind of after hearing the podcast and and seeing all the stuff we’re working on kind of hopefully getting back into it, I think there’s unfortunately whenever you have kids a lot of the times what dad does isn’t cool even if it is cool like this you know kind of thing. So yeah a lot of things skip.

Tom: A generation but we’ll we’ll see how it goes yeah I tried to get I tried to get my kids involved. So many times and the last thing they want to do. Now is look at RC airplanes that’s okay yeah it is I mean.

Ron: You have to have your own thing I guess but it would be nice to to have it be a family a family it would be. But it’d be very cool yeah we’ll see my my youngest you know she’s three. Now and she loves watching me do stuff and she was out watching that airplane running earlier and stuff and asking me when I was going to fly it and all that stuff and I told her. Well not today you know and then she’s like oh that’s awesome she’s a little disappointed. But yeah she’s excited for that kind of stuff so hopefully. We’ll get her in you know maybe in a year or two we can get her some sort of. Like easy to fly either quadcopter or something simple you know she can fly inside the house and learn she’ll be at that age that’d be. So awesome so yep very cool other thing I wanted to ask you on this,, on this little trainer I need to go over. So servos the servos that are in there I don’t know anything about them I I don’t even actually think I’ve ever flown this airplane I don’t even remember where I got it or where it came from,. Okay how okay so if I put receiver in it and put battery in it and all that kind of stuff and the servos work are you pretty much. Okay or should I be concerned. That I know nothing about them and should I just replace them for as cheap as really as you can get.

Tom: Servos, so me personally, if if I if I’m getting an airplane that’s already got servos in it or if I get a you know go to a swap heat not buy a mess of servos or whatever, here’s what I do to test them, I’ll hook up you know a spare receiver to a you know to a fully charged receiver battery I like to use these five cell, nickel metal hydroids I know I know everybody’s using lithium ion. Now anyway, I’ll hook them up to my radio, and I’ll try each servo in every channel of my receiver. And the reason I do that is because, so the proportional channels you know your you know let’s say the gimbals on your transmitter those are proportional. So I’ll run the servo slowly through the entire range of motion of that particular channel and. Then usually when you get to either channel five or six on the Spektrum that’s assigned to the flap switch or the gear switch on the transmitter and on my DX8 I think the flap switch is a three position switch and the gear switch is a two position. So I’ll hook it up on those channels and I’ll run the switch you know one two three or. One two and it’ll make that servo go from full lock one way to full lock the other way and if everything sounds good and everything looks good. Then I’ll put the servos away in a ziploc bag and that way whenever I pull a servo out of that ziploc bag I know that it came from you know a sale or whatever and it has not been in one of my airplanes yet any of the servos that come out of my airplanes I I usually don’t take servos out of my airplanes they usually either you know stay in my airplane or. Yeah they just stay in my airplane, yeah, but anyway when I put them install them into the project I will do a thorough range test range test excuse me with both the engine running and the engine not running or if it’s an electric I’ll you know cycle the power and make sure that. I mean that that’s really all you can do is just test them under conditions like that and even. Then sometimes, it’s never a guarantee a friend of mine, I think it was last summer, had spent a lot of time on a, on a newport kit from balsa usa I think it was a newport. Anyway a big world war one biplane you probably know who I’m talking about, and he had servos that he they were his they he had bought them when they were new. But they were older servos and he had taken them. Out of other airframes or whatever and put them in this new project and range tested it range tested it with the engine running and this was a gasser. So it produced a lot of noise, electronic noise and it passed all of those and. Then once he got it in the air the right aileron servo, I can’t remember if it if it went full lock or if it was just going nuts,. But eventually he got the airplane back but it was a it was a bad servo and we had done everything we could to test it ahead of time and it passed all. Those tests so unfortunately you know you never know for sure a hundred percent. But generally speaking if if if a servo will pass a static test you know we’re just with the radio on the bench and. Then also a test a dynamic test let’s call it with the engine running and everything as if you were getting ready to fly it nine times out of. Well 10 you know 99 times out of 100 it’s probably going to be. Okay yeah I hope it’s better than 90 percent yeah. So I mean you’re you’re never going. To be 100 sure but in a case like this with with it’s an old trainer plane and you’re already not you care about it a little. But not a lot, if it passes if these servos pass those two tests.

Ron: You’re fine okay yeah I’ll have to try and do that also in the next couple weeks. Yeah yep and I mean.

Tom: You can do you can do the same thing with receivers you can do you know with with receiver battery packs. They’re going to fail when they fail you know sometimes they’re not going to give you any.

Ron: Kind of warning you know I’m saying yeah and sometimes it doesn’t even matter if they’re brand.

Tom: New exactly I was just getting ready to say that. Yeah I do understand that it’s unfortunate but.

Ron: Okay well that’s good at least I know what to look for when I when I start to go over that one. Yeah.

Tom: Yeah and and when you when you run them through the test you just listen you know you want to listen for any weird grinding or any clicking especially like clicking is the first you know as it’s running through it’s motions if you hear a clicking noise coming from the servo. Yeah just just throw that servo away or buy a new gear set for that servo if you can,. Yeah because those gears are just plastic so most of them. Yeah yeah I mean there’s a lot of metal gear servos out there. Now but, yeah plastic plastic gears they will definitely make a clicking noise to tell you that,.

Ron: Hey we need some attention yeah but I I understand I mean I I get there’s a lot of the metal ones. But usually those are going to be bought, you know for a specific purpose and. Then you’re not going to find a lot of those on these older, airplanes that you get like at swap meets or something like that which might actually be where this came from I wish I could remember where I got this I do not remember where it came from,. But yeah so I I like said I don’t know anything about where that one came from and it’s it’s old. So I’m sure it’s going to be just a plastic gear. So yeah yeah just. Listen when they’re when they’re moving they’ll tell you okay? Okay so I think that is all that I have. So now I turn it over to you it is your turn finally tommy all right what did you get done this week. So nothing no I’m just teasing, oh we’re out of time guys sorry gotta go.

Tom: No I got some more work done on the horton kit boy I’ll be glad when I’m when I’m done with it. Because I’m so excited about the dualist project I’ll be honest,. But anyway I did that I did hold.

Ron: On I I do want to interrupt so that’s the only problem with this dualist thing I thought that would be something kind of fun for us to build together. But I think you’re going to be too excited and you’re going to have it completely finished by the time we’re off this lockdown thing and. Then that’s what you’re saying so that that’s my only concern. Because we still have what, it looks like, almost three weeks left on the on the official lockdown unless it’s extended. But you know who knows I don’t know how it’s going. Now so within three weeks you will probably have everything ordered you need you’re going to get your wood delivered and. Then it’s going to be. Sitting there and you’re going to be like well I’m just going to put this together and. Then you’re.

Tom: Going to be well no no no no I I have I have made a deal with myself I AM not starting any projects until I AM done with this until I’m done with my part of this horton project and to be honest I’m not. Exactly sure when my part is done and in the oh the aircraft owners part begins I’m still a little fuzzy on that. But anyway okay yeah I promise there might be some hope I will not start another project until this thing’s done, and speaking of this thing, I did get the. Left, sorry the right wing panel I get confused because this thing is built upside down the right panel is all sheeted, I have that the servo access hatches cut and fitted I have the drag rudder installation done I just need to once I cut the sheeting away to expose the the pocket I just have the linkage to run and the push rods to make I have the control surfaces cut away from the wing and I have the aileron hinged, with the freeze style, hinges if anyone remembers the frustrations with. That on the last one on the other wing panel,. So I made I did make some progress and I’m hoping to make,,. But by the end of this weekend by sunday night I’m hoping to have all of the surfaces hinged and hopefully a good start on the finishing of the drag rudders and. Then when that’s done then I can give both panels a good sanding, final sanding I’ve got a few little dings and some mismatch,, sections that I need to kind of smooth out with a little with a little putty. But hopefully, next week I can have these panels ready to mate with the center section for the very first time and with the lockdown that’s going on I’m not sure how that’s going to happen. Because the center section isn’t here it’s at the aircraft owner’s house. So hold on aren’t you making my.

Ron: Point that you’re going to be finished with this you’re going to have all the wood for the doula.

Tom: Sitting there and nothing on your desk well I’m not going to lie I AM going to probably have the wood ordered for the for the doula’s projects, right I’ll probably have it ordered honestly if not tomorrow probably sunday, and. Yeah I’ve got the plan sitting here and it’s very very difficult to not clean off this this mess of a bench I’ve got and lay those plans up here on my building table.

Ron: But I’m resisting well maybe you can just go ahead and build yours. And then when all this is over you know you can come out and help me build mine.

Tom: Okay so I’ll work through the kinks first whatever okay all right? Now we’ll see we’ll see what happens I really really want to finish this, this horn project though. Because it is a neat it has been fun to build. But I’m I’m I’m ready to be done with it. Yeah it’ll be nice to kind of get it,.

Ron: Get it off your desk and move on to something else. Yeah so and I’d like to do some flying sometime.

Tom: Soon too but now I’m working you know where I’m working. Now, through this, the covid response here I’m seven days with no days off. So I don’t I don’t have as much time as I had you know last.

Ron: Week when I was working at home yeah that’s seven days with no days off. But that’s not just one week that’s multiple weeks in a row. So it’s not like you just yeah it’s not like you’re just on for seven days you’re on for two three weeks at a time who knows yet. So yeah I think yeah I think my,.

Tom: My orders, I think they’re they’re cut all the way through the 29th of this month I think. So.

Ron: Yes it’s gonna be that for a while yeah so this is friday the 10th that we’re recording this. So yeah you, you still have, 19 days looks like. So almost three weeks right just just to make you feel better three weeks. Thanks I appreciate that way to go, yeah so that’s cool have you have.

Tom: Anything else, I did actually manage on the, on the other project that I started before this one before the horton, the, the linear invader I did I did get it finished it’s it’s actually ready for paint I decided to paint it and I think I I think I may have mentioned last time that I was going to go for a kind of, vietnam camo. Yeah, so it’s ready for paint all the installation all the stuff is done, everything has been taken back out of the airframe, in preparation for paint. So. Yeah when I get some time I’m going to probably go to lowe’s or menards and find some latex paint that, that looks about the right color and. Then, and then spray it with my detail gun and.

Ron: And then come back and put a clear over it, that’ll be nice I’m looking forward to that one too.

Tom: I AM too I, it looks like it’s a really neat looking airplane I I mean for being a plastic.

Ron: Molded fuselage it looks it looks kind of cool yeah. So okay so you have that one I know you’re working on a sop with camel too. So how many projects now why why did you have to mention that. So how many projects are you in the middle of I’m just curious. Because I know what I’m in the middle of and I I’ll tell you if you want to know, all right? But what what are you what are.

Tom: You in the middle of okay so I’ve got the horton project, the linear is invader is almost done. But that’s you know that’s a project it’s not finished I do have a an old vk kit a sop with camel that I’ve been working on for I’m gonna say years. Okay, I think I started actually building the thing about five years ago,. But it’s such a it’s such a pretty kit, I almost hate to cover it if anybody’s familiar with vk and proctor enterprises, their kits are museum quality, most of them and they. They’re just beautiful to look at with no covering on them,. But that I mean that’s the excuse I’d like to say why it’s not covered. But it’s not covered because I’m lazy to be honest. Well do you.

Ron: Think you’re ever going to actually cover it too covered or do you think you want to might leave or you might want to leave that one open and actually have it be just like a display thing.

Tom: Oh no I want to fly it I mean I’ve spent too much money on on the running gear it has a sato.

Ron: Three-cylinder radial did I mention that yeah see that’s what I I want to hear that run. So I’m I’m excited for that but my excitement has kind of dwindled over the last several years.

Tom: Right, but no so so I’ve got that project and. Then, and then I got an email from somebody who was listening to us that,, kind of sparked an interest in another project that I had actually kind of forgotten about I’ve got a house of balsa, p51 it’s a combat mustang it’s a half a sized mustang, that I I should probably I mean it’s almost finished I mean I just have to put some trim on it and,. Well probably now I have to replace a battery because it’s been in this state for probably. 10 years, but anyway that’s that’s it it’s just those it’s just those four everything else I have.

Ron: Is flyable what’s half a size because I I remember seeing that one like when I walked down there and?

Tom: It’s pretty small from what I remember it is yep. Yeah so half a refers to you know honestly I don’t know what half a means. But it was a it was a a term that was used to describe anything that was kind of powered by a cox 049. So we’re talking 0.049 cubic inches yeah, so that was kind of in in what we called the half a class maybe somebody can send us an email and say hey half a meant this,. But but it refers generally speaking to a very very small size, airframe and these particular airplanes. They were designed for combat you know they were I think they were designed for two channel. Because cox, 049s, didn’t have a throttle so you basically had elevator and rudder and you you actually tied streamers to the back of these things and you could either combat them, they made several they made an messerschmitt I think 109, they made the p51 there was a chipmunk that was part of this, scale,. But yeah they were they were just small airplanes designed for for two channels. Mine has three I put a, a 10 an os 10 fp in it,. So it has throttle and I did away with the rudder and I went with the ailerons oh I can see that. Yeah that makes sense yeah so and one of these days, you know it wouldn’t take much to finish it honestly in fact I could probably replace the battery. Now fuel it up and I could probably fly it as it is it’s completely covered it just doesn’t have any trim or markings or anything like that on it. Yeah I just it sticks out in my mind of being.

Ron: Small and like not decorated so that makes sense and if. Yeah if it’s just perfect sense yeah yeah so that’s why I just remember almost hitting my head on it when I walked down there. So that’s yeah that’s why I think that one sticks out. So much right but yeah it’s interesting yeah I really need to do.

Tom: Something about my airplane storage situation because yeah I hit my head on the on the poor kristin eagle down there, you know transitioning between my shop and the laundry room,. Yeah that poor airplane’s got more hanger rash than than most of my other ones. Yeah well that which speaking of the kristin eagle I I ordered a battery for it. So, I was I was at one time thinking of converting it back to glow. But, I bit the bullet and ordered a battery cool where’d you get that. So I’m almost ashamed to admit it I’m a cheapskate, I ordered that battery and. So just real quick, I was going through all my batteries you know getting ready for the flying season you know going through airframes and batteries and I discovered that most of my lipo batteries, due to neglect on my part and not storing them properly, had gone off and gone off I mean they didn’t explode. But, most of them wouldn’t take a charge, most well all of them were puffy. So I decided you know? What yeah I’ve had these batteries a while I’m just gonna go ahead and replace them, these little three cell 2100s are cheap enough from hobby king,? So anyway I ordered a bunch of batteries and I.

Ron: Ordered them from hobby king I went the cheap yeah I don’t see anything wrong with that I mean that’s where I’ve gotten a lot of mine before and they they have been good batteries for me. Yeah I I to be.

Tom: Completely frank, I have knock on wood I have not had any issues whatsoever with any of the batteries that I’ve bought from hobby king. Now I will say I’ve had several issues with servos that I’ve bought from there. But I mean when you’re paying two dollars for a servo I mean you gotta kind of expect that.

Ron: Yeah whenever I buy like the nine gram servos from them I I I double up I figure on one being bad for.

Tom: Every one that I I use yeah and the one and the one issue I think I mentioned in the,. Transmitter episode I think it was, about going cheap on the receivers I did go cheap on the receiver once and it came from hobby king it was one of those orange ones, and that’s the one that you know ultimately caused the demise of that of that pretty red and yellow extra,. So but aside from that it.

Ron: Operated flawlessly until that flight that wasn’t that wasn’t an extra was it what’s that that wasn’t an extra was I thought that was an edge was that the one that you got from me. Yeah it was yeah okay?

Tom: I I get the two confused I’m sorry but yeah it was the it was the red and yellow edge. Yeah I do too I really like that airplane I miss I did too I’d love to find another one that was a great flying airplane.

Ron: You know it’s amazing actually the more we talk the more you know you always talk about I never crash I never crash. But you’ve gone through a lot of planes like that.

Tom: I mean let’s because I’ve been doing it for such a long time oh maybe that’s it. Okay so in the last 10 years I’ll just put it out there in the last 10 years, five airplanes of mine have crashed and you notice I said five airplanes of mine I didn’t say I crashed five airplanes only one of those really was pilot error the other ones were equipment failure does that include the one of mine. You wrecked yes okay pizza box yeah yes it includes that one. Okay I’ll I’ll give you that one not being.

Ron: Your fault but I will also say that all the times I’ve flown it which was a lot I never had a problem. Thanks that doesn’t make me feel any better well no that’s fine. But I’m not blaming you good because I don’t feel guilty. Well you shouldn’t it was like a dollar fifty worth of foam. Yeah but no I’m okay so you’ve got five I’m trying to go through and I don’t remember and maybe I’m blocking them out you know purposefully not remembering things. But I can only think of like two or three in the last 10 years that I’ve gone through oh man. Yeah I can remember every single.

Tom: One in the last 10 years mostly because they were. So painful because they were such nice airplanes.

Ron: Yeah see I remember, I don’t remember what it was. But that that one I got from you that we talked about before that I I crashed. Because, it didn’t behave the same way I expected it to the katana thank you there was that one, I know I crashed a super sportster and that was completely my fault, when I was flying at home, before I moved the the runway to where it is. Now it was a lot closer to where you literally had to land, probably within 20 feet in order to get. Stopped, before you literally were flying right into a row of trees and I didn’t get stopped and landed when I was supposed to and I overshot the runway a little bit and went into the trees and it just it folded the wings in half, that’s the the the fuselage I have the the tail end of it hanging up in my dining room you know you know that one yes yes the decorative wall art piece I can’t believe I put that up as a joke and that’s been like seven years ago I know it’s funny. I know I keep expecting like my wife to yell at me and be like why is that still there. But she is so cool she hasn’t said a word about it maybe she doesn’t see it anymore I don’t know. Because I guess I don’t really pay much attention to it either it’s been there. So long that you just don’t see it anymore but. Yeah so those is that is that all I all I can really think of actually I’m sure.

Tom: There’s there’s been more but, yeah we can’t really count the you know don’t don’t count the foamies that aren’t really crashes you know when you door come in and you put a piece of tape on and you fly it again that’s not really a crash we’re talking about crashes where you’ve destroyed an airplane to the point where it’s a major rework to to get it going again. Well even like that that.

Ron: First, that first airplane I ever had that the three-channel, super cub even when I got rid of that it was still on the original fuselage and original wing I mean I never I never messed that one up badly, I mean we we we know some people that have folded those in half and stuff on landing and stuff. But I never did, so I I don’t I don’t know of oh god I’m sure there’s other ones. But I can’t think of anything else so your your number is much higher than mine. Yeah well I mean I’m going back 10. Years so well me too because that’s I mean that’s that’s since I started the hobby. Yeah I mean you’ve only been in for 12 not even no eight. Because I started in 2012 and it’s 2020 now so. So that’s.

Tom: Pretty good your entire career that’s pretty good but your entire career is eight years my entire career.

Ron: Is well more than that yeah but you’re only talking 10 years? So I don’t know but I mean if we were going.

Tom: By careers then you know then you’re double digits percentage wise. Yeah I think I’m in pretty good.

Ron: Shape but anyway yeah well yeah you do fly a lot of other people’s stuff too I mean they come to you.

Tom: A lot to to have them and I will say I feel pretty good about the fact that, none of the crashes in the last 10 years have been I think I did crash one of the club members, maybe maybe I’ll have to revisit that. But anyway, yeah generally speaking yeah I’ve been I’ve been pretty good, got a pretty.

Ron: Good record with club member airplanes which is good yeah and I I’ll I’ll give you mine, to maiden most of the time too I’m I I think one reason I don’t I don’t want to say crash. But one reason I don’t crash as much or have as many problems I’m very careful when I fly and what I fly if it’s you know if if if there’s anything just a little bit too wrong or. Yeah if it’s too windy or something like that I I won’t do it you know I’m not I’m not. So gung-ho that I have to go out and take chances. When I know I shouldn’t so that’s that’s probably one that you are very cautious? Yeah yeah that’s probably one thing that’s helped me before too I mean there’s a lot of times. We’ll go out to the field and stuff and you’ll be like here you want to fly this plane I’m like no and you’re like you’re fine you can do it and you know you’re not going to crash it and I’m just like no that’s. Okay it’s yours yeah have at it you know I don’t like flying other people’s stuff either. So yeah just because I would feel bad if I did something. Then I would have to you know feel like I owe them another airplane and have to go replace it and if it’s not an airplane I would buy for myself I definitely don’t want to.

Tom: Buy it for somebody else yeah no I I understand it and you know it’s I don’t I don’t experience, I don’t want to say no guilt you know when I fly other folks airplanes. But usually it’s, it’s usually somebody I know really well and either I’ve done some work on that particular airplane or I know in my head that if I don’t fly it it’s not going to make it back in one piece. Yeah if that makes sense yeah I understand, and I’m not bragging I’m not I’m not like an expert pilot or anything like that. But we do have some of our older club members, that, you know they you know let’s just say their reflexes may not be what they used to and on a on a maiden you know you you want to be pretty.

Ron: Sharp yeah you gotta you gotta be ready for whatever’s going to happen right? So I’m still.

Tom: Young enough to where I still have some some reflexes left. So there yeah I had to laugh because.

Ron: In those pictures we posted online I did okay so the pictures we posted online when I when I when I went through and was looking at them all I saw in most of the pictures there were your cheater glasses sitting right on the table. Yep yep yeah so I I laughed a little bit at that when I was like oh.

Tom: He’s getting old yep busted but yeah yeah so I I wear contact lenses. But in order to see you know detail up close. Yeah I’ve got I’ve got my cheaters so yeah so contacts and glasses that’s great yes.

Ron: Yes yes oh well I I just looked at the clock and we’re going on, around an hour and I was not planning on I was not planning on doing that at all tonight I was thinking we’d be over in about 20.

Tom: Minutes or so so we have that’s good I mean I think I I think I got I think I got all the updates and.

Ron: You got me all sidetracked on all my projects so, this was fun though I enjoyed this, anything else you want to you want to talk about or cover before we we say goodbye nope no I think I think that.

Tom: Pretty much, covers everything we’ve got accomplished here this week all right good deal.

Ron: Then, we’re going to get busy on some more stuff and hopefully have, more to report next week and, until. Then, I’m Ron and I’m Tom goodbye goodbye we hope you enjoyed this episode of the rc.

Announcer: Planelab 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: For anyone interested in RC airplanes, we’ll share tips and tricks on building models and talk about successful flights, epic crashes, and everything in between. Visit RCPlaneLab.com to join our email list and ask questions. You can also text us or leave a voicemail at 818-351-9846. Please rate and review us in your favorite podcast app. Thanks for spending time with us today. Now, here are your hosts, Ron and Tom.

Ron: Welcome to the RC Plane Lab podcast. This is Ron, and I’m Tom. Today we’re talking about receivers. Since our last episode covered transmitters, it makes sense to work our way down the radio system. Transmitters send the commands; receivers sit inside the airplane and listen for them. What should we cover first, Tom?

Tom: Getting the two to communicate wouldn’t you think sure so. Yeah it’s a it’s a process called binding, unless you’re not using Spektrum and you’re still using old school radios with crystals. Then, there’s really not much to it you just make sure the crystals match the same frequencies which I don’t think, too many people use that technology anymore no. But I’m sure there are some.

Ron: People out there that do, and I’m guessing if they do they probably already kind of know what’s going on with the crystals and all that stuff since you really kind of have to buy everything as a set to make it talk to each other. Yep, you know with the newer receivers that you bind together. They you know there’s no set that goes together you can make them talk to any receiver or you can make any receiver talk to any transmitter as long as it’s the same brand, or as long as they’re on the same, technology I guess. Yep, without actually having to change things physically on them like you used to with the old FM days yes. Yep which by the way I did look up there there used to be 60 channels 60 FM band. Yeah so that’s what I I found out and it looks like they. Skipped, 0.2 megahertz every time to go for the different channel yes that was known as narrow band.

Tom: That was, what they changed in I believe it was 90 or 91,. But because before that we were on I don’t think we had 60 channels before that. Because there was a lot of bleed over you know the technology didn’t exist to really really hone in that signal and keep it within that bandwidth. So yeah 91 I think we we all had to put gold labels on our transmitters we had to send them off to the manufacturers. So they could yeah adapt them to, to the new standards and all new radios had to be gold label certified. So that they would operate on the narrow band you know one of those 60 frequencies I think I actually. Have an old my old x347 back here with a gold label on the back with a date even? That’s funny yeah that kind of dates you yeah yeah. But anyway yeah so yeah you got to get them talking to each other and the way to do that is through binding. Okay so walk us through it what do.

Ron: You what do you do to bind your, your receiver to your your transmitter. Okay well I’ll I’ll stick to.

Tom: What I’m familiar with which is Spektrum, many of the other brands are are similar in the process you know check the instructions that come with their unit or or google it,? But, basically on Spektrum you, you fire up the receiver with a bind plug which is a a plug that, that basically shorts the first and third pins, on the receiver and tells the receiver to start looking for a signal from your transmitter, and usually you get an indication of that by a flashing light.

Ron: On the receiver so you power it up yeah so. So so what it does is it pulls the the signal wire to ground. Okay there you go yeah it’s not really shorting it out shorting out it’s kind of a when I hear shorting it I think of something bad. Okay, all you’re doing is pulling that to ground looking for a ground reference that way it knows to go into a different mode when it boots up.

Tom: Okay so once you’ve got the receiver in bind mode. Then on the Spektrum transmitter you hold down the bind button while you’re turning the switch on and. Then the transmitter then goes into bind mode and looks for a receiver that’s looking for a signal, and. Then it pairs with that receiver they communicate back and forth and agree on a protocol and a frequency if you will to communicate on and. Then they agree that they will only accept signals, or transmit signals on that frequency and this. All happens really really fast and you only have to do it once, I say have to do it once something that, you know we could talk about later something that, can be done more than once and should be done more than once under some conditions,. We’ll talk about that later but, yeah that’s, that in a nutshell that’s, once they’re bound together you turn everything off, pull the bind plug out of the receiver and. Then you’re you’re you’re ready to rock and roll so when you’re binding though,.

Ron: I don’t know if they still recommend it or not. But they they say you’re supposed to be several feet away, yes you know the receiver and transmitter should be several feet away. Yeah that way I guess it doesn’t get overloaded with too much signal. Yeah and you’ll get you’ll get an indication of that.

Tom: Because, I know on my on my DX8 if I’m sometimes if I’m too close to the receiver if I’m physically holding the transmitter too close to the receiver it just simply won’t bind,. So then I have to shut everything down start the process over and get a get the transmitter at least a few feet away from the receiver and. Then it usually it binds just fine but if it it it either binds or it doesn’t, there’s no half binding or partial binding or anything like that it either binds or it doesn’t.

Ron: Yep okay say I didn’t know if there was or if it had anything to do with like the amount of signal that was there no,. Because I remember I had one, it was a Spektrum receiver it was a little park flyer. Okay that I lost signal on and I that was before I knew how to bind and I I was really close to binding or really close together when I was binding it together,. But and I I don’t know if this is true or not. But I remember after I or after that happened or I lost the airplane. Because I lost signal I was looking somewhere online, and it said something about that it’s very important. Especially for park flyers to be bound binded bound I don’t know bound bound from a farther distance. Like I said I don’t know if that’s true or not. But I I did have a problem that’s the only one I’ve ever lost from losing signal it’s not like it was far away actually you were flying it when it happened you remember that one I I’ve that little the pizza box or the little flat guy little. Yep.

Tom: Yeah I do I love that airplane that was a good airplane. Yeah yeah I miss it I’m sorry.

Ron: Yeah but anyway no so that that was the only one that I ever lost. Because of that and like I said after after that happened I did look it up and it said that when you bind those it’s supposed to be done and at a farther distance there’s something special according to that one thing about park flyers and I don’t know if that’s true or not. But just something to keep in mind okay always keep you know a good 10 feet, just to be SAFE when you’re binding I think. Okay that’s kind of the rule I’ve.

Tom: Gone with now that’s buying new things that’s interesting because. Because the bind process. Shouldn’t have anything to do with range, so and it could very. Well be that it didn’t but you know?

Ron: Like I said that was just something I came up with after that when I when I looked it up and it could be complete bunk that’s not true,. But you know best practice go ahead and when you bind things.

Tom: Just have a few feet between between the two yeah and. Then you can you can also perform a range test with, Spektrum transmitters, by pressing the range test button which reduces the output of the transmitter and. Then you walk I forget how far it is I think 30 feet I think is what they recommend and operate all the channels and if everything is working. Then you know you’ve got a good, you know a good, pairing if you will. Okay yeah that’s a good idea too I guess yep I do that on on every. New installation, not necessarily a new model if I pull a receiver out of one airplane and put it in another one and rebind it, anytime I rebind or bind a receiver I I perform that, range function test before I fly it it’s just you know one more thing kind of like a good pre-flight you know one one more.

Ron: Little piece of insurance yeah good idea good tip, I’ll be honest I don’t do that. So I probably ought to start with some of these things and maybe that would have caught that, that one problem I had maybe you know you never know and. Yeah and it could have been a brown out could have been you know anything right weird going on with it and I I just don’t know actually I still have that receiver in a box, and it was a Spektrum receiver maybe I ought to send it back into them and let them look.

Tom: At it and see if there’s anything wrong with it. Yeah my my guess though is if it’s a park flyer receiver they probably don’t support those anymore or at least not that one,. But you never know I mean you could certainly wouldn’t hurt to hurt to you know get an answer at least. Yeah because I I.

Ron: Don’t plan on using it in anything else so it’s just kind of sitting there taking up room. So right right yeah might not be a good idea. So yeah you could do that until you taught me that to send them back in when see when something goes wrong with it. So see if anything has come out of this.

Tom: Episode you’ve learned something so there we go there you go. Yeah so yeah once you’ve got them, once you’ve got them talking to each other the transmitter and the receiver. Then you have to start you know, telling the receiver what to do right assigning channels. Well actually hold on before we.

Ron: Go too far I I want to mention when you bind,. So there’s a a battery slash bind port on most of these receivers at least the ones that I’ve dealt with. So when you bind you can actually put your battery in any port that’s correct? So yeah you don’t have to worry about yeah on Spektrum. Because so the way those work is they have their power bus to where all of the the negative and positives are bussed together. So every one of those pins is run off of the same, same connection. So when you. Power up, you know if you if you put the battery in the aileron port they’re all going to be hot they’re all going to have, have the the negative on them too. So you’re going to have ground and positive so signal is the only thing that really changes all throughout them. So when you’re going ahead and binding it you can put that in any port, as long as the the bind plug is in the bind port that’s correct? So I just want to make that make that distinction too. Yep yep yeah that’s a that’s that’s a.

Tom: Call because, I’m actually looking at one of my old, AR7000 receivers and it doesn’t have a bind port it has a battery port and all my all my channels. But no bind port so in this case you plug the the bind plug into the battery port and. Then plug your power source into any of the available channels to do the binding. Yeah and your receiver you know when you buy a receiver new it’ll of course come with instructions and tell you how to do it. But in general, if there’s not a bind port. Specifically on your receiver, the battery port will be the function you use to to set the you know to plug the bind plug in and set the binding process in motion and. Then like you said you can power up a receiver in any of the available channel slots. Because they’ll pick up power I got you now from.

Ron: Any of those feeds yep cool got it yep, so what’s next. So yeah like I said once you, once.

Tom: You’ve got them communicating with each other you have to you have to start the process of, of plugging everything in and using up all those channels that are on there did you want to talk.

Ron: About channels yeah so a normal, I don’t want to say normal the basic really, amount of channels you want to fly with I would say is four you can get away with. Yeah you can get away with the three channel receiver three channel receivers, will control throttle rudder and elevator, going up to the four channel is when you get the ailerons. So well technically you know you they don’t have to.

Tom: Be those channels like a three channel which I’m not even sure you can buy a three channel radio or receiver anymore. But, it doesn’t necessarily mean throttle aileron elevator it could be throttle rudder elevator it could be elevon throttle and I mean who knows. But, just because the I did want to touch on that just. Because the channel is labeled, for instance on my ar 7000 here the very first throttle our first channel the bottom is throttle. Well just because it says throttle it’s still a. Proportional channel it can do whatever I want it to do,. But it is set aside and the programming and the transmitter will match throttle when you go looking through the menus if that makes sense.

Ron: Yeah I just wanted okay so thanks thanks for the correction that’s fine and and you’re right I guess what I’m talking about is basic airplanes like if you’re just out looking at an airplane. Yep a normal three channel, airplane slash receiver yes will normally control your throttle your rudder and your elevator. Exactly, yep so when you when you go to the ailerons that’s when you get your fourth channel. But you’re right you don’t necessarily have to have those for those channels right, you know like we talked about before dihedral if you have a big enough, amount of. Dihedral built into your wing you really don’t need elevator or, you really don’t need ailerons. Because it will kind of self-correct on it’s own, but it’s once again I just want to want to say that it’s good to get used to four channels, absolutely and just kind of stick with four channel and don’t go anything under. Yep I could not agree more yep yeah and so when you go up to like a fifth channel most of the time that’s going to be like a gear, landing gear that are retractable or flaps or flaps and. Then yeah your six channel is kind of going to be flaps or gear too is usually. What stuff is used for now you can if you don’t have landing gear that retracts or if you don’t have flaps on your plane you can use it for a lot of different things? Exactly yeah I was just going to say that right and sometimes too if you just have six channel you might need more than six channels to do six things you know your your gear, or not your gear. But your your flaps you might want to have separate flaps, to be able to control your flaps separately, and. Then maybe you can mix that with ailerons so you have you know your flaps would also go up and down with your ailerons. But then. When you flip the flap switch then they go down? So I mean there’s a lot of different things you can.

Tom: Do right and I think I think it would help I mean? So channels I mean that that used to be how how we thought of functions on an airplane you know an aileron is a channel, an elevator servo is as a channel anymore at least at least on on modern you know radios that could do the mixing and stuff like that we use channels a little bit differently like you kind of touched on you know flaps and operating. Them separately like lots of airplanes use use multiple servos to drive ailerons. So I mean I’ve got several airplanes myself that I have a servo in each wing panel to operate each aileron independently and that takes an extra channel on the receiver, if I want to operate them independently, yes you can drive them you can drive them with a y harness on one channel. But you’re you’re not truly operating them independently so that’s how you’re going to get right your your. Flap around function to work for example is you’ll have to use up another channel or slot on the receiver. Because you’re then going to plug that second servo in the in the case of Spektrum the I think it’s the right hand, aileron servo will plug into that sixth if you will channel or slot on the receiver. So it’s yes they’re channels but but really they’re really more just plugs and independent functions. So I mean it can be kind of misleading when you say. Yeah I I fly a four channel airplane but I’m. Using eight channels you know what I’m saying yeah yeah I understand. So you know that that kind of helps the discussion sometimes you know especially if you’re going you know searching for a receiver to buy let’s say, I always say buy as much receiver as you can afford not necessarily what you need. Because, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run out of slots or plug you know except receptacles. On the receiver, because I’m using so many different servos to do this or do that or you know mix you know flapper on or elevon or or ailer vaders or whatever you want to call it,. So I.

Ron: Always yeah but most of the time when most of the time when you’re building a plane though you kind of know what you’re going to be, doing. Yeah so I mean I don’t I don’t have like a bunch of extra receivers sitting around waiting for airplanes. So you know I I will buy a receiver for an airplane as I’m building it or putting it together or whatnot and. Then when you when you kind of look ahead and know what you want it to have. Then you know how big of a, a receiver to get most of the stuff I get is going to be six channel, even if it is just regular four channel airplane or you know one that. Controls your,, your ailerons elevator rudder throttle so here’s here’s a great example right here on my building board this hold on. Okay hold on that’s fine let me let me finish this my thought what I was going to say though is you know even though most of them are four channel I have used the fifth channel even if I don’t have flaps or, or retractable gear for like onboard glow heaters. Okay you can use that or if you have a gas engine you might want to use that for,. For your choke if you don’t want to have a manual choke or a kill switch and you can oh I was going to say that too or a kill switch and that’s not a bad idea if you’re working on a gas airplane to be able to turn it off sure remotely. So like the opto kill switches are a good idea, you know most of the time when you’re when you’re working on,, like a nitro plane you can just shut that throat all the way down and that will kill the motor, I I’ve never set up a gas plane to do the same thing I don’t even know if you can or not you can oh you can. Yeah okay well then maybe next. Time when I set up a gas plane that’s how I’ll do it. But I usually put the kill switches on it I don’t recommend setting it up that way. But you can oh and what’s the so not to get off topic too much. But.

Tom: What’s the what’s the issue with doing that, well I mean if you’re if your linkage gets bound up in the airplane? Then you have no way to shut it off for for one thing unless you have an opto kill switch and that could be dangerous, you know if the if, you you’re on the on the ground let’s say and you’re you’re going through your startup process and you don’t have an opto kill switch and you’re not. Exactly sure where the throttle is set and you go to fire the thing up and runs at half throttle and takes your arm off that’s another good reason to have an opto kill I mean there’s lots of reasons. Not to set up an airplane that way but anyway. Okay all right I I’m just curious so go on. Yeah so what I was going to say was you know the example that’s on my on my bench right? Now this horton kit I mean it’s it’s a fairly simple airplane it’s a flying wing with two electric motors. But, even with the Spektrum DX8 and an eight channel receiver I’m I’m out of, I’ve used up all the slots and technically I I have the flap servos on on a y harness. Because I don’t have any more slots that I. Could use, so even simple airplanes, depending on on how you’re driving the control surfaces and and what other function if I wanted to put lights on this airplane I that I could control from the transmitter I simply couldn’t? Because I’m out of I’ve got all my all my, servos and and the two speed controllers they’re all all the slots in the receiver occupied. So, I I always I mean I will always tell people you know if they’re shopping for a a receiver just to just to have or for their. Next project buy as much as you can afford because, you know I I hang on to airplanes for a long time. But I also you know trade and whatever you know somebody likes an airplane I have I’ll pull my radio gear out of it. Well now I have this radio gear and if if it’s a six channel receiver. Well now I’m limited to putting this in a in an you know in an airplane with six servos or or five servos in an electronic speed controller or whatever I’m limited I’m limiting myself and I have an eight channel transmitter. So why not at least have an eight channel receiver. So I can you know so I can use all. Those functions if necessary just just something I can see that. Yeah just something I I try to I try to do whenever I can if I’m you know if I’m picking up a receiver I’ll I’ll try to pick up whichever whatever is in the budget, and and maybe. Then some if I can yeah oh well and I get that I usually.

Ron: Like I said just buy what I need for the airplane I’m working on right, and I I don’t really think ahead that way, and it really hasn’t bitten me too much. Because most of the stuff I’ll buy is going to be like a six channel I don’t necessarily buy four channels very often right, I guess that does give me a little bit of extra leeway in case I need to add something to it. But yeah most of my stuff is six channel I have some seven channel eight channel. But most of the stuff I have is just six.

Tom: Yeah and and honestly most probably 90 of the airplanes I fly would be just fine with a six in fact I mean I I don’t I’m looking around the shop here,. Well I’ve got the kristen eagle I think I have it set up with eight channels. But, yeah I mean six channels will fly 90 of the airplanes I own. But it’s just nice to have that those extra channels you know when the should the need arise. Yeah buy buy what you can afford for sure but if you can afford a little bit more, I always say you know go for it if you can. Yeah and and I understand that so like one of the.

Ron: Other considerations too though is like for my my big yak, I actually fly that on an eight channel receiver, even though I have a lot of servos in it right and that’s. Because I use one of those smart fly boards, would you want to go ahead and explain kind of how those work. Yeah so a smart.

Tom: Tray is, is basically nothing more than a power distribution center if you will, your receiver is still doing the receiving function you know receiving the signal from the transmitter and. Then sending it you know in this case to to a power distribution center which allows you to plug in multiple servos, on there there’s lots of different ways and and lots of different boards out there. But essentially lets you you know if you if you want to think of it as ganging servos up on. One channel without using all the wiring and the y harnesses and all that it’s a nice cool little board with all these plugs that you can plug into and. Then you run a a lead from your receiver to that particular channel on the board and. Then the board divvies that up to the servos, usually you know they they also provide provisions for, optical kill switches that are built into the boards which are pretty sweet, they also offer, multiple, power sources to be plugged in. So you have. Redundancy built into the especially like on your yak you know you can use I think it’s two, receiver batteries,. So you have that sort of redundancy and that extra capacity to drive those high volt or, high volume power hungry servos,. So that’s kind of what a what a power board or a smart tray or a power distribution block or or whatever you want to call it is it is it allows you to to really really gang up those servos on those big control surfaces without using up a lot of slots in your receiver.

Ron: And so what I like about that too though so you’re you’re correct I’m not powering anything through the receiver the only thing, the only power the receiver sees is from the batteries that go into the smart board and. Then right that handles all the the the higher amperage right? Yeah I draws I.

Tom: Should have said that but yeah exactly exactly what you said that the the power is not going through the receiver to drive all those those heavy duty servos the power is actually going through that board which is built very robustly to handle that current? Yep exactly yeah it’s made to do that yep and the.

Ron: Nice thing I like about them too depending on what kind you get, they will actually have separate endpoint adjustments and. Yeah for each servo so on my yak there’s there’s two servos per aileron. Okay, and I used to use matchboxes on those so it’s a what a matchbox was it’s a little I think jr made it and you can you have one input going into it and. Then it, it matches the servos so a servo even when they’re close they really don’t put out the exact same, position and that could. Be just how you have it set up you know if you have your clevis just a little tighter on one than another you know that the the actual position will not be exact and you don’t want those servos to fight each other you want them to work perfectly in unison with each other. So they’re not, so they’re not trying to change the other one’s position right, you don’t want you don’t want any torque you don’t want any, twist in that aileron as as you’re as you’re flying. So what they do is you set your endpoints,, you know your your full throws on them. So that they’re not. Fighting each other and and you can do that in the matchbox which is, like I said it’s just a little box that, it’s really not much bigger than a receiver. Okay, and then usually those sit I don’t remember if I had those in the wing or if I had them in the in the fuselage. Yeah it doesn’t matter yeah yeah so the the smart board though gets rid of those and the thing I like about the smart board though is it also does the you know the the matching the end point adjustment and all that. So they’re not fighting each other, but it just makes the whole inside the plane. Looks so much nicer it does, yep so you have single wires that go into the receiver and it just it makes the whole thing look a lot cleaner it does the installation looks nicer and it really works better in my opinion,. So you know we talked before about the the power bus that’s in the receiver those are only made to to handle. So many amps exactly you don’t want to pull a whole bunch of power through them if you do right you can, overheat them you can burn them up you can have a lot of issues, with even with smaller airplanes. Because some of these newer servos are actually. Pulling quite a bit of power through them sure so make sure you’re not overloading, overloading your your receiver with it and and what happened you know that’s what happened to my plane when I almost lost it that one time to that big yak is that you know I think it was pulling too much power, through that receiver and. Then it just shut itself off and and reset itself. Because it was just pulling too much through and it just kind of you know freaked out. Yeah saw a low voltage and browned out yep right which I’m I’m. Okay with that I’d rather have it do that than actually you know catch on fire or. Mess something up inside of it true, so you know with with the running the smart boards in there you’re able to control the power where it’s going you’re able to control the signals much better,. Because like I said on not only do I have two two, servos per aileron there’s two servos on the rudder there’s two servos for the the elevator. So there’s there’s a lot going on in there right and a lot of electronics going together working to make those those actually work in unison and not fight each other. So smart boards if you have a big airplane are a good thing to have I think. Yeah I I agree.

Tom: Especially if you’re using like you said you know you’re using those high voltage, or I’m sorry those high amp draw, servos and multiple power sources they really do clean up the installation.

Ron: Yeah and it’s nice to be able to power it off of two batteries too completely separate. Yep you know if you have a problem with one battery you still have that other one in there to kind of.

Tom: Help right so I I wanted to mention, I hate to go backwards. But, binding, yeah because I wanted.

Ron: To say something about that too but you you might be on the same page as I AM. Well yeah what position.

Tom: The sticks should be in when you bind yes yeah pretty much. Yeah so usually, during the construction of an airplane or or an arv or anything that you’re gonna you know install your own radio in, you know you’ll have to you know bind your radio system together. So you can start using it and then you’ll you know you’ll install your servos and. Then you’ll set up your linkages and all that stuff and on that first bind, your your goal is to get the transmitter and receiver working. Together and that that’s fine, but once you have your airplane, especially the control surfaces set up, you’ll want to bind it again and Spektrum I think Futaba offers something similar. But Spektrum offers a, or they don’t offer they build it into their system, oh gosh I just the name of it escapes me. But it’s a it’s a kind of a a safety device that’s built in such kind of like a fail SAFE fail SAFE thank you that’s it,. Yeah that is sort of built in that will drive the servos to a. Predetermined position, in the case of a like we were talking about your yak with the brown out, and and that those positions are set during the bind process. So you know you you’ve bound your radio and you’re setting up your control linkages and this is especially true for throttle, and especially on electric airplanes,. Yep you want to when you get everything set up and and you you’ve right you got your airplane built and all the linkages are the way you want them and everything. Is standard you really ought to rebind everything with those sticks on the transmitter in a position that you want those servos driven to in the case of a a signal loss or a brown out or or or something you know wrong during the flight and usually those positions you know low throttle and if you want you know maybe a little bit of up elevator and maybe some right I don’t know whatever set the plane up in a shallow you know glide turning glide or whatever, and those positions are set during? The buying process so like I said when you’re all done and and the airplane’s good to go you’re all finished you’re proud of your work go back there and rebind it, with the sticks in those positions. Because that’s very important and that’s often, a step that gets overlooked and I know I’ve overlooked it many times you know and I go to the field and I turn the transmitter on and I turn the switch to the, to the airplane on and the servos go you know crazy in one direction I’m like oh I forgot to I forgot to bind it in my fail SAFE position. So just something to think about so.

Ron: And what it’s also very reminded me of that sorry. Yeah that’s right and it’s also very important to remember if you ever reverse the direction of a servo to rebind especially if it’s throttle,. Yeah I think we both yep we both know the same person that had an issue with that, he had an issue to where you know he got it all set up and got it running great. But the throttle was reversed right well.

Tom: I laugh I’ve done it too I I can’t laugh at that image I’ve done it myself. So yeah well but yeah and.

Ron: Then and then what happened was he lost signal and instead of going to you know going all the way down to an idle it was a nitro plane and it went to full throttle and it just flew away. Yeah so very important to remember to do that, and and the other thing you know when you’re when you’re going to the fail SAFE like what I always do to check it and I don’t know if this is the right way to do it or not, electric gas doesn’t matter what kind. So I will act like I’m doing my run-up you know when. You’re you’re standing oops you know when you’re standing over the airplane right, with your with your feet, holding it to make sure it doesn’t go anywhere right, I will just turn my transmitter.

Tom: Off yeah that’s one way one way to test it, I prefer to do that with the engine not running. But.

Ron: Yeah that’s that’s a way to test it yeah I mean right? So I mean if it’s an electric one you obviously can’t turn the engine on or off I arm it and I do all that kind of stuff. But when I’m when I’m just checking to make sure everything is set up right, before I and this isn’t done every time I’m just talking about when I when I set one up,. So it’s not every pre-flight I don’t do that but it’s after I get it all bound together and get it and get it set up the way I want it I’ll just you know sit there and turn it off and make sure it works right? Yep yep yeah that’s that’s it that’s very important because you know if you’re working on a little electric one and you don’t have that. Set up and you know it’s in your basement or something like that and you have it plugged in and. Then you don’t think about it you turn your transmitter off first and you have it not bound correctly with fail SAFE. Then you’re going to go full throttle and you can really get hurt, you know especially like I said if it’s an electric one. So it just makes a lot more sense to do it the first time make sure it’s done right and. Then always rebind it you know with the fail.

Tom: SAFE the way you want them yeah no I I agree. Yep so do you want to do you want to I mean we talked about AS3X and and SAFE in our on our you know our other episode did you do you want to hit on that.

Ron: Again a little bit yeah I think that’s a good idea,. Because that technology you know lives in the receiver absolutely you you know not only do you get that when you buy an airplane that has that built in,. But you can buy AS3X receivers, and then you know those are very important to read the directions. Yeah because they have to be put in correctly yeah anytime you have a gyro in there or something like that you know that it has to be there’s usually one way that can sit. In an airplane and work if you do it wrong you’re going to crash right and and like we mentioned in the.

Tom: Other episode they you know they after a little bit of research don’t don’t mount your AS3X receiver.

Ron: With velcro right yeah it was a little bit too much. So that’s that’s good too yeah it needs to be a good.

Tom: Solid mounting and like you said it there’s absolutely a direction, or or several usually I think, the last AS3X I saw you there was like three or five, acceptable mounting positions and.

Ron: Nothing else so yeah read the directions yeah I’ve never actually, used one of those and I I don’t.

Tom: Necessarily think I plan on it either yeah it’s not it’s not something that, that I’m terribly interested in in in purchasing if it comes with a with a foamy. Then you know so be it but, it’s it’s not a it’s not a technology that I’m I’m going to seek out. Because like we like we said before it’s it’s really a designed to be a a tool to to assist new pilots you know to you know to become proficient flyers and I feel like I’m a fairly proficient flyer. So I don’t need the the stabilization.

Ron: But it does have a you’ve only been flying for about like 90 years. Now so yeah it’s not quite that.

Tom: Long but, I mean you know on the on the small foam airplanes. Yeah I guess you know I had that little, that umx, e-flight beast that had that technology and it was pretty cool it would you know on a windy day I could fly that thing and it looked like there was no wind out there. But, I’m pretty confident that, I didn’t need that to at least fly the airplane. But anyway, yeah and my only I guess.

Ron: My only other problem with those is I you know I don’t want it to give somebody a false sense of security that,. Well this is how a plane flies so I’m okay oh it’s 15 mile an hour wind. But that’s right I’ve done this before yeah exactly yep you know I you have to watch what you’re doing and know your skill level right and don’t rely on the airplane to do it for you. Exactly you know that’s my two cents take it for what it’s worth. But I agree I prefer to be the one yeah I prefer to be the one in control completely. Yeah so that’s that’s just me yep and then you know for flying for the. Hobby I mean I really think they’re cool when you can program and take off and and land on their own and do all that with drones and all that too I think is is neat setting the waypoints and watching it fly go to different heights and all that. But that’s that’s not that’s not the hobby that I enjoy.

Tom: And and really that’s really not the scope of of this podcast. Anyway no correct so that’s yeah.

Ron: Sorry we shouldn’t talk about that my bad no that’s. Okay, and then you know and then thanks.

Tom: For scolding me the, the SAFE technology is is kind of kind of the same. But different it’s it’s a tool designed to you know to get people you know flying, with with little or no experience and, same kind of deal you can buy SAFE technology I think, off the shelf and you can also get it in.

Ron: In arfs and things like that, oh see I didn’t know you could get it on and a receiver off the.

Tom: Shelf I think that’s that’s good to know yeah I think,. Well I I can’t say that to any certainty because I haven’t I haven’t sought it out to I had a an arf that had it in there and I didn’t particularly care for the airplane. So I sold it or traded it or whatever but, I believe you could buy that receiver off the shelf, and what airplane was that by the way I believe it was a hanger 9 p51 I believe oh you got rid of that one I did. Yeah yeah I think I did not know that I.

Ron: Think that was one that was the one I thought about getting off of you that’s been a few years ago.

Tom: Yeah it had the little 10 cc gasser on it ran really really good. Yeah yeah it was a yeah, I remember.

Ron: You flew that at the the warbird flying and stuff that was a good one. Yeah yeah, it didn’t fly.

Tom: Bad it just not it didn’t fly in my opinion like a p51 should and it wasn’t designed to it was designed more or less as a as a second airplane kind of a low-wing trainer to get people away from trainers and into airplanes that look like airplanes. But, yeah that was kind of what that was kind of what.

Ron: Took me away from that one is it it was a good looking airplane. But it didn’t have that actual, p51 shape to it you know they they they fudged a little bit here and there to kind of make it fly better which is you know that’s cool I understand that was the point of it. Now if you want to scale p51 that’s not what you’re going to get and that’s kind of what I didn’t like about it right,. But it.

Tom: You know it did it did fly good and it did look good in the air and the engine ran good and all that. But the SAFE technology wasn’t really, for me and it was, in my opinion, on that particular airplane on it’s highest setting I I don’t believe if it was flying away from me I could get it to turn and come back to me it was limited that much, oh wow. Yeah I mean it I don’t know how it does it I’m sure it does it with gyros and you know built into the receiver and all that. But I think on it’s. On it’s most severe setting or most corrective setting for lack of a better word it wouldn’t let it bank more than 10 or 15 degrees. So if yeah if it was flying away from me and I needed to turn the thing around especially if I needed to turn around quickly, you know to avoid say a tree or you know flying over you know you know populated area or whatever physically with the stick buried to the right or the left it physically would not turn enough. So I for that reason but you you could turn.

Ron: That off though correct you could I mean like completely off. Yeah you could, but the airplane.

Tom: Just wasn’t set up to be aerobatic but anyway you know that’s not what we’re talking about,. Okay?

Ron: The,, only other thing I think I want to talk about them before we, before we get off here. Okay, remotes for the receivers okay like satellite receivers yeah like satellite remote receivers whatever you want to call them satellites sure modes. Yeah I’ve heard it both ways yeah Spektrum.

Tom: And Futaba both use them and so what’s the point of those. Okay so on the on the receivers let’s say we’re talking about a regular rolled four channel receiver no satellite, receivers, plugged into it or anything like that it has the antenna you know coming right out of the receiver and our Spektrum our DSM specifically receivers have really really really short antennas. Because the signal is so good right it doesn’t need these long antennas like we used to trail out the back of our airplanes.

Ron: Or make them you remember yeah, I’ve seen pictures yeah. Yeah never owned one like that right?

Tom: Right my my poor contender here has got he’s got a still got a scar on the side of the fuselage where the antenna used to come out. But anyway, so they’re even though they’re really really really good, they’re they’re kind of limited, I don’t want to say limited that’s not not the correct, word. But they they can only they only gets a clear picture. Because the receiver is usually buried in the airframe right we don’t stick our receivers on the outside of the airframes. So therefore the. Receiver antenna is also inside the airplane so at some angles, that that the receiver you know when you’re flying around you know obviously we don’t just fly straight and level all the time we like to do loops and rolls and spins and all these other things occasionally during some of those maneuvers we may not present the best target for our transmitter to send a signal to and what I mean by that is the antenna may not be in a prime position to receive the signal from the transmitter, and. Yeah so.

Ron: They when they should be parallel to each other you know when you’re flying. So to get the best transmission and the best signal to your receiver, you know you don’t if you’re looking right at it you don’t want that wire to be pointing right at you. Exactly you want that wire to be 90 degrees from you. Yeah, and same by the way we didn’t cover this. But same with the transmitter when you’re flying it you don’t want you know they they bend those the the antenna bend. So that is because you.

Tom: Want to be able to they do on ours the new new transmitters they don’t bend at all. Well I guess.

Ron: That’s true they have they have such a better right and and smaller antennas in there even that work. But exactly for those of us that have some of the older ones you know when when you do have that bend and make sure, and this goes for any antenna even like if you’re trying to set up your home internet when you’re working with your routers and and and such you want those antennas to be broadcasting, you know it’s I don’t know how to describe it very. Well but it’s you know they they when it when that antenna is sticking up that is when it broadcasts around it. So it doesn’t. Broadcast out the end of it it broadcasts around yes what the, like the how the antenna is pointed right? So always make sure you kind of bend that antenna that way you get better coverage got it.

Tom: Okay so, Spektrum what they did, to help alleviate that problem of of you know end to end transmission let’s just call it which would be the weakest link between the two right as you can plug a another additional small receiver essentially, into your main receiver that has antennas attached to it that you can. Then position in a different plane if you will and not by airplane I don’t mean. Airplane I mean a different plane of reference right so for instance if I’ve got my ar-7000 here mounted flat in the bottom of my fuselage with the with the antennas pointing out you know towards the left and the right I can. Then plug in a satellite receiver run it to a different part of the airplane depending on how long my lead is and. Then orient those antennas 90 degrees ideally to the antennas that are on the main receiver and what that does is it prevents, a more robust if you will, target. To receive the signals from the transmitter, so that’s the purpose of satellite and a lot of these newer receivers you can plug I think three there’s some of them you can plug three satellite receivers. So if you’ve got a really big airplane or sailplanes especially, really high performance sailplanes, the fuselages sometimes are made of carbon fiber and carbon fiber is not a very good it’s it’s it I mean it blocks it’ll block signal. Yeah yeah so it’s important especially on airplanes like that to use. These satellites, strategically to you know to try to get a good signal to your main receiver and and that’s the function of my yak my yak has two of them. Yeah my, my old, hanger nine yak here I’ve got two satellites in that as. Well in addition to the main receiver, more right and and more is.

Ron: Better yeah and the nice nice thing about those two is you know you can you can put a nice long lead on them right and get them far away. Yep, you know if you have a bigger airplane especially get that as far away as you can you know don’t just put it right next to that other receiver six inches away. Exactly you know I I think I have one on a, a five foot, extension and get that like back in the tail section get that as far back as you can. Yep yeah I’ve got it I’ve got it mounted in the turtle deck of my yak. Yeah right and and the nice thing about that too is that kind of helps prevent some. Noise especially if you have a gas engine you know right those, those ignitions create a lot of electronic interference and a lot of noise,. So by getting that as far away as you can that helps.

Tom: Too right yep yep so that’s the that’s the function of a satellite, receiver is just it’s just to augment the the sight picture if you will of your main receiver to get a better signal, from the transmitter just to help guarantee that you don’t get those brownouts or signal. Well yeah I was gonna.

Ron: Say it doesn’t necessarily have anything with brownouts because they don’t they don’t. Yeah they don’t handle any, any electronic, I shouldn’t say they don’t handle any, servos or anything like that you know there’s nothing else plugged into them they are simply simply antennas. Yep, that that yeah they just give you a better signal, into the airplane. So you can see it better, not see it see it. But you know so your your receiver can talk to it. Exactly your transmitter better yep so yeah.

Tom: That’s right, anything else you want to cover on this one, I don’t know I I kind of I kind of think I’d like to talk just briefly, about the the serial or the or the S.Bus type receivers,.

Ron: I mean yeah that’s fine I I don’t know anything about those. So yeah and I and I don’t know very much.

Tom: About them, aside from you know the the,, FPV and drone guys use them,. Because especially on these small racing drones they don’t have a lot of area. Now you yelled at me for talking about drones before. So now you’re going to go ahead and do it. Well I’m just that’s where the application really lies with with these receivers,. Okay and the only reason I mentioned is because, if if buying a receiver is in your future, this might be one you can sort of take off of your radar. Because. For for standard model airplane use we don’t generally use those S.Bus or ppl type receivers. Because they’re really designed not for airplanes they’re designed for drones and things like that. So, like I said if you’re in the market for a receiver that’s one option you can sort of take off your list and try to help clear up the clear up the choices, just. Because they, they’re really not designed for for standard rc plane type use with the servos and all that.

Ron: That’s really all I wanted to say about that okay? Well that’s good to know so yeah I guess if I see those out I’ll just walk by them and. Then ignore them and not do anything right I mean they they do.

Tom: They do have their they do have their use and and they’re pretty neat and slick what they can do. But unfortunately they they’re not quite what we are, are using with the RC airplanes and besides that I mean we have other means we can use that they really clean up installations,. Because you’re only using one wire from the receiver to drive all these different motors in the case of,, drones. But, you know we talked about the smart trays and that’s kind of the same idea sort of and that’s. What we use to clean up the the mess in the big airplanes? So anyway stay away from those receivers you don’t need them good advice leave them leave them alone and they’re expensive. Anyway so there.

Ron: Oh yeah save some money then buy a higher channel receiver there you go see. Buy more than always comes back to that yeah there you go. Yeah, okay well then I think for me I’m done if you’re finished. Then, we’ll sign off until next time I’m Ron I’m Tom see you later bye.

Announcer: We 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 RC Plane Lab.com or email us direct at either Ron at RC Plane Lab.com or Tom at RC Plane 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.

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 the RC Plane Lab podcast. This is Ron. I’m Tom. Thank you, first off, for joining us. Before we get into it, I just wanted to thank everybody who’s signed up for our mailing list. I also want to say thanks to everyone who’s reached out to us with comments. We’ve had a lot of positive feedback, and I, for one, am happy with how well this podcast has been received. Thanks for listening, and continue to reach out to us. We love hearing from you. Do you have anything you want to add to that, Tom?

Tom: No. Certainly more listeners than I thought would have joined us on the journey. So for that, I’m thankful, and I’m glad you guys find what we talk about interesting.

Ron & Tom: Yeah.

Ron: Yeah, I agree. I’m very happy with how this is turning out. I wasn’t sure what to expect when we started. But, you know, I think with the feedback and the numbers we’ve been having, it’s worth continuing.

Tom: Yeah, I think so.

Ron: Hopefully it’ll grow from here, and we’ll continue to get more of an audience and more feedback and, you know, just have some fun with it. So, um… Sounds good to me.

Tom: Yeah. So, Ron, what’d you get done this week?

Ron: Okay. So, um… Nothing. It was… It was… Okay, so my problem was that it’s been…

Tom: Well, you shouldn’t say nothing. I mean, you may not have gotten a lot of RC stuff done, but you did get a lot of stuff done around the house.

Ron: That is true. Yeah. So I’ve been working outside pretty much every night this week. It’s been a beautiful week here. Um…

Tom: Yeah, fixing us up a nice place to fly.

Ron: Yeah, I have gotten out a couple times. Um… I got the Super Sportster out. I think I went through… I actually do think I went through two batteries on it.

Tom: Well, see, you did more than I did. I haven’t even flown yet.

Ron: Well, but that’s circumstances. You know, you’ve had a lot more time to work on stuff than I have. Um… True. But I… You know, I did get out and get a couple flights on that, so that was nice. Um… I haven’t flown that one since last year, and that’s a… I like that plane. It’s fun to fly. It’s very easy. Um… You know, well-behaved, of course. It’s just a good old plane. Um… Yeah, but other than that, I did… You know, I got some trees burnt, and we had a bunch of stuff to do outside. Just from, from, you know, fall last year, we cut down several trees around the property and finally got that burnt and taken care of this week. So for the weekend, I should be in good shape to start working on stuff. Um… Cool. Mostly because it’s going to be cold and rainy this weekend, so…

Tom: Yeah. It’ll be a good day for that for me. Yeah, the forecast doesn’t look good for this weekend.

Ron: Yeah, which is actually good news for me, so… I guess I can’t complain.

Tom: It’ll keep you inside so you can get some stuff done inside, right?

Ron: Yeah. Well, RC airplane stuff, hopefully. Well, that’s what I meant. I did actually get my batteries delivered today. The ones I told you I ordered that were supposed to take, like, four and a half years to get here. Oh, yeah.

Tom: Yeah. Yeah. They showed up, huh?

Ron: Well, they did, and I was actually a little upset because I was watching, or watching the whole week. Um, Monday, they were delivered to the, the main town that’s around us. It’s, uh, well, the town you live in, it’s about 10 minutes away from me, 15, and it sat at that post office until it was delivered today.

Tom: I don’t know what took them so long.

Ron: It’s not that far away.

Tom: I know. It showed up there.

Ron: Normally what happens is it’ll show up there one day, and then it’s delivered to me the next. It gets taken to our small post office in our town, um, in the morning, and then they deliver it to us in the afternoon. But for some reason, it sat there for, uh, four days before it got delivered here. So I was a little upset about that, but you know what? I have it now. I couldn’t have used them anyway if I had them earlier. So, and that probably avoided the temptation of coming, uh, coming inside early and working on it. So I will, I will get to install those this weekend and get everything, you know, put back together and hopefully finished on this airplane. But we’ll see how that goes.

Tom: What about you? What have you been up to? Well, I mean, still working on this, uh, flying wing project. Uh, I did manage to, um, to get the left-hand panel pretty much ready for finished sanding. Got the control surfaces cut off of it and hinged. Uh, got the hinges working, which was, uh, which was a real chore. Got the flaps, uh, hinged and, and working the way they should.

Ron: Yeah.

Tom: So, yeah, actually, I mean, it doesn’t look like I got a lot done on the, on the wing, but I, I really did. And these little details are the things that really consume the most amount of time, you know?

Ron: Yeah. Well, now, since you have the one pretty much finished, not finished, but pretty much finished. Right. Um, do you think the, the second one’s going to go a lot easier for you?

Tom: Yeah, I think so. I, I, uh, I glued the, I glued the sheets together to, you know, to make the, to build the bottom, um, sheeting, which, uh, I think I’m going to do a little how-to on that, uh, here, you know, sometime soon. I took a bunch of pictures as I went. Oh, okay. Because a lot of, you know, a lot of our airplanes today are, you know, have balsa sheeted either foam wings or just balsa sheeted, you know, open framework wings. So it’s not a bad idea to know how to sheet a wing. So you have to start by building the skins and that’s what I did. And, um, I’ll make a little how-to on that. But anyway, I got the, I got the, the sheeting actually on the bottom of the, of the right hand panel now. And that’s, uh, that’s actually setting up as I, as I speak here. Oh, that’s nice. Yeah. Next will be, uh, to cut the control surfaces out on that one and, uh, start the hinging process on that one too. I, I do anticipate it going a lot faster this time, uh, cause I know there was some stuff that I could do ahead of time, uh, some stuff that I could build ahead of time. So I wouldn’t have to worry about it after cutting the, uh, the surfaces off. So I did that. And, um, I think, I think it’s going to go a lot quicker.

Ron: Oh, that’s nice. That’ll be cool. So I’ve never sheeted like, you know, wing, like you’re talking about, and I know we’ll get into it more in depth later, but what’s a, what’s a general overview of how you do that?

Tom: Well, basically you just glue, you know, edge glue, uh, whatever thickness sheets you’re going to, uh, plan on using. You know, they, I think about the widest, uh, you can buy balsa sheets now, six inches wide, I think. So if you’re covering, you know, if you’re sheeting a wing that’s, you know, got a 12 inch cord, you’re going to need at least two pieces of sheeting, you know, and, uh, and I like to, to do it in one sheet. I don’t like to sheet, uh, the wing in sections. So I edge glue, you know, however many sheets it takes to cover the wing, uh, to build the skin. And then once that is, uh, once that’s dry, I’ll sand it smooth. And then, um, basically just apply adhesive either to the open framework, you know, the ribs and the spars and whatnot, or the foam, uh, core, uh, and, you know, lay the sheeting on there and weight it down and let it cure. That’s, that’s basically that’s, that’s all there is to it.

Ron: Oh, okay. So what kind of glue do you use then? Like on the edges, do you use a wood glue or do you use like a super glue or what?

Tom: I I’m old school. I like yellow carpenter’s glue. Uh, it sands easy. Yeah. It takes a little more time and it’s, you know, you don’t get that instant, you know, gratification of having it done as soon as you, you know, put the glue on it. But, um, it makes for a smoother joint. I think it makes for a better looking joint. It’s easier to sand. And like I said, CA, you know, if you’ve ever glued two sheets of a balsa together with CA, it creates a hard spot where the seam is. Yeah. And depending on the, on the sanding apparatus that you’re using, you know, that, that hard CA doesn’t sand as easy as the balsa around it. So usually what you’ll end up with, especially if you’re using like a, a foam sanding block or, or something that maybe your hand or whatever, you’ll actually get a raised seam where that hard CA is because it didn’t sand down as fast as the balsa around it. So that’s why I like to use wood glue.

Ron: Well, I would think too, with as hard as it would get, uh, you know, like the CA dries pretty, pretty hard. It’s not going to have any give in it that it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t make the bend as well as like a, a glued joint with wood glue.

Tom: Yeah, that’s true. Yep. That’s, that’s absolutely true. Luckily, you know, most wings, they don’t have a lot of sharp corners that you have to go around. Um, but yeah, you know, if you have that, that CA and that seam, that seam is not going to be flexible at all.

Ron: Yeah. Well, especially cause it doesn’t like when you use CA, doesn’t it like actually get into the wood a little bit and kind of wick into it.

Tom: Yeah, it wicks into the wood. Yep.

Ron: So if you’re trying to get it around a, you know, a curve on a wing rib or something, you might not be able to get that to lay, uh, to lay flat like you need it to. Right. So, yeah, I guess it is better than, um, you know, to take your time and, and let it dry overnight or something and not try and rush through it.

Tom: Yeah. Yeah. And I, I, I, I’ve gotten, as I get older, I get, I get more patient. So now I don’t, I don’t have to have that, uh, that instant, you know, got to get this done so I can move on to the next step. I, you know, I can let it, I can let it cure overnight and it’s fine. I’m not in a hurry.

Ron: That comes with maturity, I guess. Old age.

Tom: I suppose. I suppose it does.

Ron: Well, then you also told me a couple of days ago that you, uh, you, what, you started on another, another project then since this one was kind of in the, in the throes of drying and you, you were, well, so ready for something new.

Tom: Yeah. Well, not, not, it’s not a new project. It’s, uh, it’s actually a project that I had started before I took on this flying wing project. Uh, and it was actually on my building table. I had to clear it off my building table to bring this one on. Uh, but it’s a, it’s an old, uh, Lanier, uh, it’s an, it’s called the invader. And this is probably a, an airplane kit from the early seventies and, uh, it’s all plastic. It’s a, it’s a foam wing, but it’s, it’s a, it’s a molded fuselage and the foam core wing is actually covered with a product that, uh, Lanier called AeroSkin.

Ron: I know what you’re talking about now. You showed that to me before when I was over at your house. I didn’t realize that’s the one you were talking about until now. Okay.

Tom: Yeah. Yeah.

Ron: That’s a neat looking airplane.

Tom: Yeah, I think so. I think, uh, I, uh, I, you know, you give me a hard time about, about pilot figures and airplanes and the crazy things I put into the canopy. So this time I kind of looked around, I didn’t find any, any pilots here in the, in the workshop. So I thought, you know, I’ll just tint the canopy and not put a pilot in there. And I thought, well, instead of tinting the canopy, maybe I’ll just black it out, you know, and then I’m looking through my paint and I’m, you know, I used to paint RC car bodies too. And I have this, uh, color changing paint. I thought, wow, that’d be kind of cool. I’ll just, you know, paint the inside of the canopy with this color changing paint. And that way I don’t have to put a pilot in there. So I did that and I was really, really tickled with how it turned out. So yeah, you sent me a picture.

Ron: It turned out good. I like that.

Tom: So, um, yeah, so I’ll, you know, when I get the, uh, electronics all installed and, um, I’m almost done with that. Actually, I think what I’m going to do is I’m going to paint the entire airframe. Um, and I think I’m going to go with like a Vietnam kind of a camo, you know, kind of a OD green and sand color camouflage on the top. And then maybe a, like a lot of light gray or maybe a duck egg blue, something on the bottom. Cause it looks like a jet. It looks kind of like a, you know, a Vietnam era jet kind of thing. I think it’ll look cool.

Ron: Yeah, that’ll be neat. I don’t, I guess I don’t remember exactly what that looked like. I’ll have to look it up because it was, uh, I remember it looked kind of sleek, but I didn’t get the, I didn’t get like the jet vibe. I got more of like a, a stunt plane type vibe, but I didn’t see the wings or anything either.

Tom: It really reminds me of, of, uh, of a pattern plane, like a Phoenix seven. Um, it has a double tapered wing and it’s a very slender fuselage and, um, but it has some molded in details. Like it has these jet exhaust back, like where an F4 would have jet exhausts and these weird kind of jet intake looking things. And I don’t know, it’s something different. And if you, anybody listen, just Google Lanier invader and, uh, there’s not, you probably won’t get too many hits. It’s, it’s an old airplane. There’s not too many of them around anymore, I think. But, uh, yeah, it’s kind of cool looking. I think it’ll look cool when it’s done.

Ron: Yeah. I can’t wait to see that one too. So actually for everybody that that’s listening, they probably don’t realize whenever you put pilots in an airplane, most of the ones that I’ve seen you do have been stuffed animals. So usually, because I, so I guess the only thing I can figure is, you know, your kids are older now, so I guess they don’t have any stuffed animals you can steal anymore to put in them. So you, you just have to black them out.

Tom: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, pilot figures are kind of expensive, you know, I mean, geez, to go to the hobby shop, they’re 12, 15 bucks for a, you know, a 40 size pilot figure. So I just go up to the kid’s room and, you know, whatever stuffed animal they’re not playing with anymore, I, you know, chop the head off and stuff it in underneath the canopy.

Ron: Well, come over here sometime and you can go through Piper’s stuff. I’m sure she’s got a whole bunch of, uh, of stuffed animals that she will never miss. And, uh, it’ll be good to get them to fly around a little bit.

Tom: Yeah. Yeah.

Ron: But don’t forget too, we have, we have the 3D printer. So if you ever want to print something, you can find something and, and print.

Tom: That’s true. Yep.

Ron: So, yeah, I don’t know. Um, so what else? I mean, have you hadn’t had time to do anything else then or is that about all?

Tom: Well, that’s, that’s pretty much it. I mean, I, I took our own advice, you know, off of our, uh, our episode about, uh, pre-flights and I’ve been doing some air aircraft maintenance. Uh, you know, I’ve been, uh, kind of going through all my airplanes and, you know, cycling batteries, things like that, and going over, you know, airframes, cleaning them and checking all the hardware and stuff like that. Just trying to get everything ready to, to fly for the season.

Ron: Um, yeah, that’s a good idea. I mean, this is a perfect time to do it. So.

Tom: Right.

Ron: Yep. That’s a, that’s a, that’s a good thing to do. I’ve gone through a couple of the ones I have, um, not nearly all of them. Cause I know I’m not going to get to flying all of them this year. Um, it’s just, it’s not a bad idea to maintain them. Well, I, I guess, but I, it’s not like I’m swimming in a whole bunch of extra time right now. So no, I understand if, if I, if I had the time and all that, that would be awesome. And then I probably would fly him this year actually. But you know, I, I, I’m, I don’t want to say disappointed, but I’m surprised by, you know, when all this started, the lockdown and all that, I really expected to have more time than I have now. So, you know, work is still full time. So I’m, I don’t get any time there, but by the time we get home, it’s, it’s just time to go outside, work on stuff. And I don’t think I was expecting the, the warmup, even though obviously this time of year it always happens, but I don’t think I was quite thinking through all the way to what it was going to be like. So. No, I understand what you’re saying. It’s okay. Well, and you’re, you’re going to be.

Tom: The warm weather kind of took me by surprise too.

Ron: Yeah. One, it’s probably not here for a good yet, but we’ll see. Um, but you’re going to be going back to work too, I heard. So.

Tom: Yeah, I gotta start tomorrow. Um, and it’ll be, uh, uh, the, the job I’ll be doing is, is probably going to keep me, it’ll be every day. Probably I won’t get any days off, you know, for the duration that this particular operation is going on. So, um, but it’ll be regular hours, you know, go in at seven and I think we’ll be done by five every day. So at least there’ll be some kind of normalcy to it.

Ron: Yeah. Just unfortunate that includes the weekends and all that. So.

Tom: Yeah. Yeah. It is what it is. I, I’ve had a pretty good run. I can’t complain.

Ron: Yeah. We, we should have recorded more of these then before, before, uh, you had to go back to work. I, I regret not having any extra done. Like we, you know, we originally planned on having two, three, four, maybe even five of these, you know, in the bank, if you will, before we, before we released them. And we have not stuck to that, but you know, I, it’s more important, I think, to get some of these out and kind of get going, even if they’re not as long, you know, as some of the other ones are, I’d, I’d rather get something out every week than, than not. So.

Tom: Right. No, I agree. We’ll, we’ll get, we’ll get some done. Like, like I said, my, uh, I’ll be done by probably at the latest five 30, six o’clock every day. So, and where I’ll be working is pretty close to home. So I’ll still be able to record in the evenings.

Ron: Okay. Well, good deal. Um, well, anything else you want to talk about then, or you just want to kind of call it quits for today and start over tomorrow?

Tom: I think I’ve, uh, given a pretty good, uh, pretty good update. I think, uh, everybody’s up to speed with where I’m at in the shop right now.

Ron: All right. Well then, um, until next time I’m Ron. I’m Tom. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you next time. Bye.

Announcer: We hope you enjoyed this episode of the RC plane lab podcast for topics, 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.

Ron & Tom: Bye. Bye. Bye.

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