Episode 4: Updates and Listener Feedback

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