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In this episode of the RC Plane Lab Podcast, Tom talks about how he plans on syncing and tuning the 3 engines to get them ready for the Tri-Motor Project. Ron also gives an update on his balsa order. Here’s a hint, still no balsa!
Episode 71 Transcript
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[0:00] Hello everyone, welcome to the RC Plane Lab podcast. I'm Ron. And I'm Tom. We're back to podcast form. Back to the original, the original. The original, the original, yes. Yeah. So yeah, this is our first back to audio only version of the podcast. There's nothing on YouTube this week. Nope. Makes it 10 to 15 times easier on me. It does. And we're actually sitting on couches. We're comfortable. We're back to just… I'm still a little chilly though. I mean, your house is still cold.
[0:37] That hasn't changed. Comfortable. Our house is still comfortable. There's a blanket next to you. You don't have to worry. You can wear a blanket if you want to, or put a blanket on, whatever. If you want to, you don't have to worry about. Yeah, you don't have to worry about people looking at you on YouTube and making fun of you for wearing a blanket. I can make goofy faces like this, and nobody will judge me. That was a normal face for you. So anyway, we are back.
[1:02] Wanted to say, first off, before we get into anything else, so before our break we talked about starting to do some interviews we have had some people reach out and that we're interested to do it thank you those of you that have however we're not quite there yet with our internet it's getting better and better as time goes on but we're still getting some cutouts every few minutes to where you lose a couple seconds. And we want to put out a quality product.
[1:30] I don't want a lot of what? Huh? Hold on. Oh, you cut out. So what we're going to do is wait it out a little bit longer. And once that gap gets filled in, we will circle back to that. Well, you mentioned off the show last week or last time that you had a tree that might potentially be causing some issues. Will that help? If we cut the tree down, that would help. Okay. But also, once they get the satellites back into position and doing all that stuff, it
[2:03] will cut down a lot more on it, more on it too so we'll see okay they're saying they should have like coverage worldwide pretty much by september which means which means all of our gaps will be filled in that is crazy yeah it's like a net all the way around the world yeah but anyway not our point here right just know we will reach out and start doing interviews before long if you contacted us about potentially being on the show we have not
[2:31] forgotten about you we will contact you as soon as we get some really really good internet yeah and give us a little bit of time still we'll take a long time no but just don't like expect call tomorrow right and if you want to be on the show and you haven't actually reached out yet go to the website rcplanelab.com and click on i think it's be a guest at the top or something up there i don't remember you can also just contact us and say hey i'd like to be
[2:54] on the show someday here's here's what i'd like to talk about and you can contact us lots of different ways yes but if you fill out the questionnaire on the website, then it gives us all the information that we need. True. Or want. I guess we don't need, but want. Want. But yeah, however. But don't, yeah, reach out and do whatever you want to do and just get in touch with us. Yep. Next. That's all I actually had for announcements.
[3:19] Okay, now so speaking of good internet and things like that we were we were able to post a new video on the on the youtube channel all three engines running all three three ys 120s running i'm not going to say in harmony yet but they were running together simultaneously yeah i think you're kind of getting it what i was thinking when they were running like the first two and they were just two of them running together, they sounded really good.
[3:47] I was expecting the third one to add a lot to it. To me, it really didn't. It was… Out of sync. It was underwhelming. I mean, I'm a ninja guy. I was whelmed. I wasn't underwhelmed. I wasn't over… I was just plain whelmed. It was okay. There was nothing wrong with that. I i was whelmed so anyway i am very much looking forward to hearing all three engines run in sync in sync like tuned not like the 90s way and but or is it what the
[4:19] 2000s band i don't know in sync yeah i don't know anyway NSYNC. Yeah. I don't know. Anyway. So yeah, something your kids listen to, I'm sure. That's going to require a lot of work. But yeah, when they are all running in harmony together, it will be quite the spectacle. So then that's something that you won't do on the test stand. You wouldn't spend the time to do it there, or would you? So, here's my plan of attack. I'll just go over this here. Let's talk about tuning engines,
[4:55] like getting them all in sync today. We aren't quite sure what to talk about, but I think that's kind of the direction we're taking now. So, let's go that way. First off, can I start with electric? Well, sure. Okay, okay so ron let me ask you please do how do you how do you sync electric motors you don't have to because electric is so perfect i mean there's no tuning involved you literally plug each one of
[5:18] your escs into the receiver and then you're done and that's it you can set end points if you really want to if you need to change things you can i didn't have to on the on the do list and that honestly is the only one i've done two engines so it's very simple yeah what do you do well it's not quite that simple so no the plan of attack for for me is we'll probably utilize different run stands. Like I'll probably use my
[5:49] stand at home and run each engine individually, tune them for optimum performance. So, and then I'll make a note of the peak RPM and a good idle RPM for each engine, right? And then I will somehow mark each engine so I know that this one's number one, this one's number two, number three, so on and so forth. And then once I've done that for all three engines, then I will have a better understanding of how far off they may be. Because, I mean, we noticed, or I noticed, on the run video,
[6:24] that there's one engine that is clearly underperforming the other two. Right. And which one was that? It was the middle one. Now, hold on. I will say, like, after watching the video, here's one thing that I didn't even pay attention to. So, we had those mounted on that run stand with the, the triple run stand. The two end ones were on a single piece of plywood on that stand the middle one was on two pieces of plywood so if you pay attention to that
[6:53] video especially that motor is jumping around a little bit oh it was solid i'll be honest i have not watched the video in detail yet well you. I'm going to. But that middle one was not mounted to the same piece. I mean, it wasn't going anywhere. It wasn't going to break off or do anything like that. But that is also what caused, we were wondering why the screws in the servo backed out a little bit. That's right. That's what caused that.
[7:18] So if you watch that, like I said, that motor does move. So I would not be too worried about that engine yet. I'm not. Okay, well, i wouldn't be either then right but and the reason i say that is because i i want to run each engine independently like all by itself and really really concentrate on just that one engine like in the three run the three engine running video i couldn't really concentrate on one engine because, well, number one, it's hard to pick out
[7:47] one engine out of three that are running at the same time. what I mean? Yeah, to hear which one's off. Exactly. So I want to optimize each engine individually on the run stand under ideal, controlled. They'll be using the same tank. They'll be using the same plumbing. They'll
[8:02] be using, obviously, the same fuel. It'll be the same mounting. The fuel lines will be the same tank they'll be using the same plumbing they'll be using obviously the same fuel it'll be the same mounting the fuel lines will be the same everything will be the same the only thing i'll be doing is swapping engines what i mean so if i can optimize all three of those individually then i will have a better understanding of if they're off they may
[8:21] not be off it may be an indication i forgot all about the servo being loose so that might be why that engine never really reached peak rpm yeah maybe the throttle wasn't yeah maybe it moved quickly before we even noticed anything about it so so anyway optimize all three of them make a note of the peak rpm for each one and if they are off which they probably will be some, and that's not
[8:45] uncommon. every engine doesn't perform exactly the same as one just like it, even though you would think they should. Because, carburetor orifices, I think that's the plural of orifice. Orifice I. Orifice I, there you go. I could be wrong. I like that. Yeah. We'll go with that. But anyway, there could be small differences that would lead to, differences in peak RPM. But once I have those numbers and I have them
[9:11] marked down, once the engines are installed in the airplane, then I can limit, endpoint adjustments or whatever to get those matched at either end the high end and the low end so you're not going to like you're not going to want to be changing the tune on them once they're done so you don't want anything to change on any of them once you mount them exactly like i want the engines to run in their most ideal state i don't want to have to richen one up to to
[9:47] to drop rpm because as altitude changes or whatever that engine's going to react differently than the other one that's optimized so that if all three of them are optimized it should run the same as the other engines no matter where it is in the altitude or whatever so what if you get to a point where it needs to be like retuned like you retune your nitro planes just quickly when you're
[10:10] flying at the field every time so theoretically if if they do need tuned they should all need tuned right and it should be a simple matter of one or two clicks on a high speed needle and that's it but now remember these ys's they dons, they don't have a low-speed needle. It depends on that regulator screw to get that idle RPM just right. And by optimizing that on the stand, I will hopefully never have to worry about that particular adjustment.
[10:40] Will you try, like when it's built into the cowling, will you try to have an access point to that, or are you just going to leave that? My plan is to not have an access to the low speed, to that regulator screw. But, I mean, it would be a relatively small hole. And my, kind of looking forward as to how we're going to mount those engines and we're going to have a fake dummy radial i imagine there's going to be plenty of access for that anyway yeah so but there
[11:12] will definitely be access to the high speed needles and like i said theoretically if all three engines are optimized if one needs a slight adjustment they will probably all need the same slight adjustment so then like would it make, instead of doing it all just on that one stand, would it make sense to have them all mounted on this thing that we used already, and then just kind of work one at a time, and then that way you can run them together
[11:37] to see how close they will be once you're done adjusting them? We could do that, but there are are differences even on our little run stand because it was hastily put together that was a run stand yeah the tanks were all were different sizes so that's a different potentially a different pressure inside the tank the fuel tubing was all probably different lengths i like the fact of being able to optimize each engine on my run stand using everything the
[12:05] same for each engine well but i guess what i'm saying though is if we're going to have to have three whatever size tanks at the end why not just set that all up now and then have one full set done to where all you have to do then is just install that in the airplane yeah we could certainly do that and then I could hear all three of them run together optimized and I would be happy. Yeah, we could do that. But even after
[12:32] they're installed in the airplane, you're going to have things like making sure the geometry of the throttle linkage to the servo, that was going to have to be identical or I'm going to have to get into the and this was another step in the process once I have the engines optimized I have the mat the rpms matched on the high end and the low end then you have to make sure everything is the same through in the transition from low to high right well that
[13:00] should be easy to do then the engines, but not on the nose engine. Right. Because if we end up putting a pilot, an interior, all that kind of stuff, you might not be able to get that servo in the same position as you can on the outer wing ones. Right. And that's why it'll require fine-tuning on the airplane whenever that gets done. When we get to that ever that gets done when we get to that point so
[13:26] yeah it'll be it'll be a lot of tinkering which i love to do anyway before we get them on the airplane and then it'll be more tinkering when they're on the airplane so what's the be fun so then what's the next step after you have them all tuned and let's say we mount them together on this stand so we can hear all three of them run the right way, how do you make sure it's all set up the same? Sorry, to go back, when you have them tuned the same,
[14:03] even if it's tuned to where their max RPM is 11,000, whatever it's going to be, let's say it's 11,000. Okay. And you have an idle that's, what, 2,000 RPM? Yeah. If you have that tuned the exact same for all of them, does that really, does that curve work the same for every engine to where half throttle then is 7,000 RPM? Maybe. Maybe. Yeah. Like, so there's differences in servos like you can buy three different servos and the the low to high might be perfectly linear
[14:32] on one servo but it may be less than linear on another servo even though they might be the same servos so once they're mounted let's say we're going to put them on the stand, on our three-run stand. That's its name now, three-run stand. That used to be a bean buggy, by the way. I rescued that from an old farm, and it had an engine on it, and they used to use that to pick the weeds in bean field back in the 70s. It was actually made here in central Illinois somewhere.
[15:03] I don't remember what the company was. But yeah, I saved that from a farm rebuilt it my kid and i kind of put another motor on it for a little while and just played with it and then it was in the junk pile again to get rid of and then we decided hey let's use it for our run it's really handy because it's like the perfect height oh i know it works great on them and everything but yeah once once once i've ran each engine optimized it
[15:26] and then we'll mount them on the stand again the three run stand again and what my goal is to put each throttle on a separate channel and is that how you did it on this video yes okay and then to that will allow me to independently adjust each servo. And in addition to that, each servo's EPA endpoint adjustment, and then also the IX12 that I'm planning on using, I can also program curves.
[15:56] So, for example, let's say I've got all three engines idling perfectly happy at 2,000 RPM. And then I run them all up to full throttle and they go happily to 11 000 rpm perfect so now next test will be back it off to half throttle and let's say one engine's at 7000 rpm and the other ones are at 7500 i'll be able to use that throttle curve or that curve function to bring that middle in line with the other one so I got
[16:26] okay yeah so that's why I want to use three separate channels so I can have really really fine control of that curve from idle to full throttle that makes a lot of sense then yeah did you have to go through all that with your duelist no actually the umuelist, I just, I mean, I have them on separate channels on the Duelist. But those engines, and you can hear it in the Duelist flying videos, they're not perfectly in sync.
[16:53] They're pretty close at idle and they're really, really close at wide open. But everywhere in between, I don't really ever recall them being perfectly in sync. And on that airplane, I don't really fly it much being perfectly in sync and on that airplane i don't really fly it much less than full throttle anyway so i didn't worry so much about it but i could because of the way i set them up i could do the curves just like that and i may do that as a
[17:15] matter of practice because you like to tinker because i do like to tinker yeah so yeah that's the that's the plan for syncing three YS120s. I think that should go well then. Yeah. So start on it. Well, okay. On the airplane or on the engines or what? We'll start with the engines. Okay. Where are you, by the way, on the airplane? When are we actually going to start? Because you have stuff you need to do that you haven't touched. Yeah.
[17:47] So I finally got the remainder of my Balsa order that we ordered April of last year. Remind me to backtrack on my balsa order when you're finished, by the way. Oh, okay. You got news, hopefully. So I'm going to go through that order, or the remainder of my orders, and take stock of what I have. So that was a different company, by the way. It was. So it's not who we were talking about before. It was. And it took you a year. Year and a half. Year and a half. Yeah. From the time.
[18:08] Well, not a year and a half. A year and three months. May, June. A year and a quarter. So it took you a year and a quarter from the time you, here's my money, I want some balsa. Yes. To the time you got your balsa. I got the majority of the order pretty much right away. you got your ball i got the majority of the order pretty much right away but yeah this this was the remainder of that order which was about a quarter of the total of the order and i just got it
[18:32] last week oh that was that stuff you ordered for the duelist yes that just hit me that yes exactly wow so that plane's been built and flown for six months. Yes. Wow. Yeah. And this particular company, I wasn't worried about it. They gave me communication. I got emails from them periodically saying, here's the status. What's that like? It was nice, actually. Cool. Okay. But yeah, it was fairly low stress.
[18:59] I'm pretty low stress when it comes to stuff like that because I'm not in a bind. Now, if I had been in a bind and I really needed that stuff, I would have probably told them to, just bill me for what you have, refund me for what you don't have, and I'll source it somewhere else. But you still had to source it somewhere else, because we bought a bunch of stuff up at our hobby shop. Yeah, we bought it because it was a good deal. Like the stuff at,
[19:24] at the place in Champaign, the big bundles we bought because it was a good deal like the stuff at at the place in champagne the big bundles we bought that was a good deal i didn't i oh yeah no no you're right yeah i didn't buy some of that there i forgot about that and i was like quarter by three or quarter by four sheets i think weren't they well quarter by three that was what i mean quarter inch
[19:40] by three inch sheets no they were eighth inch these were eighth inch sheets or three thirty seconds was it yeah they were big they these were eighth inch sheets for 3 32. was it yeah they were big they're wrapped in plastic but anyway yeah yeah so once i take stock of everything i have then i'll put together an order for the company that you're dealing with and then and then yeah we had talked a little bit about the fuselage stringers out of a new
[20:04] type of material we had talked about yeah we'll see how that goes but it's actually a an aluminum covered plastic it's going to be heavier but it's going to be stronger and i think for the stringers it's probably going to be okay okay it's like it what's called an aluminum composite panel so we're going to try that and we'll see how that works yeah you can glue to it easily. We'll tinker with it some before we actually build a fuselage out of it.
[20:33] But I think with the design that we have come up with and the layout, I think it won't be really that much heavier than building it more solidly out of balsa. Built up balsa. Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, we have done some behind the work scene behind the scenes work behind the whatever we've done some stuff planning wise and we we've kind of made some some end road some i my gosh i think yeah what's it called we've made some headway
[20:57] headway into that or something what's a headway i don't know four and a half pounds eight pounds anyway we've we've made some progress. Yeah. Yeah. And that's all I was trying to say. It took me that long to get out. But yeah, so we have some plans on what we're going to do. But back to my balsa order. Yeah, yeah. Three weeks ago, I was told it would ship by the end of the week. huh. Still not here. Oh, that's that's my update. I have no clue. I've not heard anything back.
[21:26] So I don't have anything, not heard anything. The funny thing is that we've had three people reach out. Yes. Asking me. They've all guessed the correct company. What company we're talking about. Like I said, if you've reached out, yes. Yeah, you nailed it. I'm not going to say it. Once again, I don't think that's appropriate yet because I just don't. I'm not out to badmouth anybody. But yeah, so apparently it's not just me and it's not just going to be you.
[21:57] And it happened to you with another order too a year and three months later from a different company. Different company. year and three months later from a different company different company and like i said and i even said this in our last podcast i said i can excuse lateness because of the because of the current situation with balsa i can excuse waiting a long long long time for some balsa because the company was forthright and they told me ahead of time hey
[22:26] we don't have this particular stuff in stock it's gonna be did they tell you 15 months when you ordered it though well no well I don't think they knew it was gonna take that long okay okay but anyway I'm not in a hurry so if i had been in a hurry yeah i would i would probably be a little more upset and who knows when i when i finally go to place my order with the your company i may get frustrated hopefully not i would do it soon that's all i'm saying do it
[22:58] soon well i'm waiting i'm waiting for next year like so the company we're talking about he does post updates on social media and so i'm waiting when he he usually posts an update whenever he's getting ready to acquire balsa stock not stock but the bricks that you cut it out of yeah also lumber so when i when i see that he that he's acquired some of that then i then probably that's when I'll place my order. What does that matter, though?
[23:28] Because I'm not being told he doesn't have it in stock. I'm just being told he's not doing it. Oh, that's not good. Yeah, I've not been. He's never said, oh, I'm out of all this stuff. He's just said I'm working on getting orders out, and yours is coming up soon. So, yeah, I don't think it's because he doesn't have any. Well, I'm fairly certain that's why he's not sending stuff out. Really? I think so. Why would you not tell me that then? I don't know.
[23:58] Like I said, there's not even been hinting of that. Okay. It's just I'm getting through as many orders as I can. Your number isn't up yet. Anyway, let's move on. That's not the big deal. So, yeah. Last thing I want to talk about then. We had somebody, let's see, where's my paper here? Alan reached out to us and he said, I've enjoyed your podcast. I'm new to flying and I'm learning from you as well as other resources.
[24:23] I may have missed it, but I'm wondering if you could all do an episode after your break on the basics of selecting and mounting a camera and getting good footage in flight. Type of cameras, how to securely mount so you don't lose it, 360 degree feature, FPV, et cetera. I'm not sure how much of that you do. That's a great question. It is. And one actually that we could use some input on. Absolutely.
[24:48] question it is and one actually that we could use some input on absolutely okay i will say first off trying to get video of an airplane flying in the air from the ground is very difficult to do well yeah that takes people who do that well that they make it look easy. And it's not easy. It's not. It's very difficult to keep that little airframe or airplane in the frame, in the viewfinder. Yeah. So I have not mastered that yet. No. Nor have I. No. I mean, you are worse than me.
[25:18] I've seen it. It's terrible. So that's difficult. But if you're talking about flying an airplane and putting a camera on it, we only have, well, we've only used one real camera to do that. We both have the GoPro Max, which is a 360-degree camera. Which is awesome. I love it. I do, too. It does a really good job. Downsides, though. It's heavy. It is a little heavy. So you've got to have a bigger airplane to do it. Yeah.
[25:46] And you have to watch CG because of the size of that, because of the weight. So if you're trying to get into doing it, like for us when we mounted it, we knew we were going to be putting that camera on that airplane when we built the airplane. Exactly. So that made made a little bit easier for us because we were able to strengthen the spots where we were going to mount it yep you really i mean you have to have a good mounting point for something that heavy absolutely so
[26:17] solid balsa behind it is what we did we used the the quarter inch rod kind of as a as a standoff we used the quarter-inch rod kind of as a standoff. And then once we drilled through the balsa and tapped it out, used the thin CA glue to kind of strengthen that up so that it was a good, tight fit. When it comes to other cameras, though, that are lighter, a lot of times you can just stick them on. I would like to get another camera or two that are the lighter stick-on types.
[26:50] Now, what do you guys use?
[26:58] So if what you, or if you've used a different camera that you liked, something that's light, something that works well, reach out to us and let us know what you're looking at. So I found, I think it was a, what was it? I found the RunCam. I don't know anything about it other than I saw it on Amazon for about $100. There's a few different versions of that that look like it might be good. Like the footage I've seen is pretty good.
[27:20] It doesn't, from what I can tell, though, it doesn't really stabilize it well. Okay. Like the GoPro does. Yeah. The GoPro does a fantastic job of that. Yes, it does. I I mean it really does the only problem though with GoPro too is that you have to have a pretty decent computer to kind of do all the processing and stuff on it because those are big files big files yeah big and it's an extra step because when you record if you use it in three or in the 360 mode you record
[27:42] that whole 360 that you have to tell it look at this and then look at this and then look at this at this time yeah so that it will go through and process that for editing too yeah but it gives you good results it yeah it really does but i think we could probably minimize that the image stabilization that you're talking about we could probably minimize surface vibration and things like things like that just with mounting i think if we're if we're
[28:10] careful at how we mount it like i haven't seen the camera you're talking about but i bet there's ways to to mount it so that we don't have to worry so much about that yeah but yeah let if you guys if you guys have been successful video video recording flying from the ground, let us know how you did that. Yeah, because I would like to not master that, but get a little bit better at it. Because that is not easy. Right. At least not with the setup we're trying to use.
[28:40] So if a good setup that's not terribly expensive, let us know. Yeah, and if you use cameras, too, that work well for doing that, just that you can tape to a plane or something like that, I want to be able to fly smaller airplanes with a camera on it. I don't want to have to use a bigger plane to make up for that weight. Yeah, and we think you guys want flying videos. It doesn't matter what we're flying.
[29:04] So if we have some smaller airplanes that are easier to fly, that makes it easier for us to put out videos for you. That is true. So yeah, if you've got a camera you guys like to use or you've seen someone use successfully, let us know what it is and we'll look into it. All right. Well, anything else you want to talk about? No, that pretty much covers what I wanted to cover. I think it's a short one this week. Is it? Sweet. Yeah. Sometimes short is good. Short and to the point. Yeah.
[29:32] If you guys have anything else you want to talk about, go ahead and email us, ron at rcplanelab.com or… Tom at rcplanelab.com. Or go to the website and just fill out the contact us form and let us know what you want to hear. We will be back in a couple weeks. Yep. Anything else you want to say? No, just go watch our three-engine run video if you want to. That was worth making, that's for sure. Yeah. And then check out some of our other videos if you want to do that sort of thing.
[29:57] We will do it again. Yep. And we are planning on doing some other quick little videos like that, so you can expect some stuff like that from us soon. Great. Well then, until next time, I'm Ron. I'm Don. Good night. Good night. We 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
[30:26] 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.
