RC Airplanes Anyone?

Just took up this hobby after years of RC Cars. Its a lot of fun...when you don't wreck. I made a little video of me and my buddy flying our new toys around. Forgive the quality, its my first time making a video and we used a digital still camera to record it. Let me know what you think.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=NYIEZVSzYpc

I always loved RC stuff but never owned a plane or helo, which I have always wanted.
 
My wife was sweet enough to get me a cheapy RC plane for my B-day, actually a year ago to this week.  It was one of those where the altitude was controlled by the speed and had a rear fan for turning
 
Well, JUST as I finally got the hang of it, the damn transmitter broke   The potentiometers just died.
 
My wife says she should have bought me the helo
 
Hey Dooks, have you ever seen this?
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IXQVh5IbHc
 
Someone in my company that had ties to this guy told me he is some kind of designer or engineer for one of the plane manufacturers and built this from scratch.  To this day I'm still amazed.

quote:

ORIGINAL: HummerGuy

I always loved RC stuff but never owned a plane or helo, which I have always wanted.

My wife was sweet enough to get me a cheapy RC plane for my B-day, actually a year ago to this week. It was one of those where the altitude was controlled by the speed and had a rear fan for turning

Well, JUST as I finally got the hang of it, the damn transmitter broke The potentiometers just died.

My wife says she should have bought me the helo

Hey Dooks, have you ever seen this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IXQVh5IbHc

Someone in my company that had ties to this guy told me he is some kind of designer or engineer for one of the plane manufacturers and built this from scratch. To this day I'm still amazed.

That jet is pretty amazing. I bet it cost more than my H3.

Here is one of the best RC's I have ever bought:

www.havocheli.com

You can pick them up @ Target for $30. Great for flying in the house. Extremely durable.

Man my dogs would LOVE that! I have seen those many times but thought they wouldn't work well.
 
Can you control the altitude or just forward and turning?

quote:

ORIGINAL: HummerGuy

Man my dogs would LOVE that! I have seen those many times but thought they wouldn't work well.

Can you control the altitude or just forward and turning?

Altitude is controlled by throttle. I put a little weight in the nose to make it move forward more. It basically always moves forward. Letf/right is controlled by the tail rotor. Its a little trial and error at first, but I'm pretty good at it now. And like I said, its very durable. I have wrecked it hundreds of times and nothing has broke.

My dog HATES is by the way. He tries to snatch it out of the air. Very amusing.

Never got in to rc planes, built plenty of model airplanes growing up. Would have still have them today if I didn't find fireworks when I hit my teen years.  Made some great explosions though.  Cool video. What's the learning curve on the havi heli?  Is it hard to fly?

I grew up flying RC planes. I've had little ones and some big ones. I had a 1/5 scale P-51D Mustang with a 4 stroke engine, had retracts, flaps and all the goodies. It was painted up like a Reno Air Racer Mustang I once saw.

Also had a 1/4 scale Piper Cub with floats.

THEN.... I got the helicopter bug. Bought a Kalt Baron 30 back in the late 80's. It was a handful to even hover. I didn't know how to fly it and it had no gyros back then, I could bunny hop around and that's about it. Then I got a mechanical rate gyro for the tail rotor and man that settled it down. I moved shortly after getting into helicopters and eventually sold the heli, cub and mustang.

I wound up getting back into helicopters back in 2000 and flew a little nitro powered Raptor 30, then a Raptor 60, then 90. Then I sold all the Thunder Tiger stuff and moved up to the pro line of Miniature Aircraft Fury Extremes. It was a beast, it would fly about 80 MPH in straight and level fly, climbs over a 1000' a minute and could fly upside down, backwards, you name it IF you move the sticks the right way.

After flying the two Fury Extremes with the OS 91 racing engines with 30% nitro. I moved up to Gas Helis, even bigger and badder than the glow fuel machines.

I was a field rep for Century Helicopters for a few years but had to resign the position due to my job keeping me out of town most of the time.

I still have my aerobatic gasser, it's a big heli weighing about 13lbs wet. And I am building a scale customized Hughes 500D for scale class competition.

Here's a picture of me and my Fury Extreme 3D aerobatic machine:


Here's a few shots of my Fury flying inverted:




Here's my 3D aerobatic Gasser:




Here's my Hughes 500D Scale Helicopter project, almost finished:

Wow Hummer Driver! Nice Heli's! Heli's take so much more skill to fly. I have a E-Flight Blade CX (learner Heli) and its pretty hard to hover. I watch a lot of 3D Heli videos on youtube...it just amazes me.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Trey124

Never got in to rc planes, built plenty of model airplanes growing up. Would have still have them today if I didn't find fireworks when I hit my teen years. Made some great explosions though. Cool video. What's the learning curve on the havi heli? Is it hard to fly?

Havoc Heli is pretty easy. You will get the hang of it in 5 minutes. You'll be a pro in a week.

BTW_ Here's a really cool RC helicopter video I shot and produced. It features this guy who is a 10 time national champion at flying areobatic (3d) helicopters.

I shot and produced several of those videos a few years ago, it's a lot of fun and we even have night flying capable helicopters, the blades are carbon fiber with LED's embedded in them and we add light rope down the tail boom and around the canopy and add some chemical cylume lights to the landing gear and fly at night, man what a rush that is!

So here's the link to the video, it's about 16mb, compressed down ALOT but still good, it's got glow fuel/Nitro machines (the ones with all the smoke) plus gassers that have no smoke (gassers) and even a gas turbine scale EC135 (if you're wondering, that red gas turbine helicopter cost around $20G).

HELI VIDEO TRAILER

I'm pretty sure this video has some video of all these helis.

ENJOY!

I always thought that stuff was so cool. When I was growing up one of the nieghboor kids dads was into the remote controlled planes. His dad had a shop with 4-5 in it. They all seemed so big. Back then he said he had to make them all himself from kits.
Closest I got to RC toys were my daughters RC cars.

They still have old school airplane kits available for the purist. It consists of a full size set of plans on paper. It's up to you to select the right woods (balsa and lite-plywood) and then cut out the templates and then cut your wood and get it all just so. After it's all glued together you need to cover it, not too many people use the silk paper with aero-dope to paint over it like they did back in the day.

Most use the more modern iron on (heat shrink) coverings which really revolutionized the art of building your own airplane.

Of course today a "kit" is considered to be a box of laser cut wood ready to assemble with super glue and epoxy. There are more complete kits called ARF's which are "Almost Ready to Fly" just add your radio gear and motor (gas or electric) and go fly.

Some are RTF "Ready to Fly" out the box, meaning everything is prebuilt and finished and basically you charge it and fly it.

Helicopter kits are typically a kit of nuts and bolts and helicopter parts, put it together per the instructions and use a lot of loctite and drop in your radio and engine and go fly.

There are a few smaller true RC helicopters that are pre-built out of the box and are ready to fly after charging all the batteries.

I started out on glow fuel systems, glow fuel is expensive especially when you get into the higher nitro percentage fuels. 30% nitro can sell for close to $30 a gallon and a hard flyer can burn two gallons a day. I moved to the bigger gas engines with a coil and sparkplug.

I don't run gasoline, I run Coleman camping fuel and mix it with AmSoil 2 stroke synthetic Sabre rated at 100/1 mixture, I actually run mine around 64/1.

Electric helicopters and airplanes have really gotten popular over the last 4-5 years with the advancement in battery technology. Small high power lithium Ion and Polymer battery technology spurred the jump to viable electric flight. Now I hear there is a new battery based on magnesium, supposed to be even stronger than LiPo but way more safe.

I've seen the high end electric motors for helicopters rated around 3-5 HP and are drawing around 80 amps. Incredible power for a small motor smaller than the diameter of a soda can.

The elite high end of helicopters and airplanes are true jet turbine engines. The little things fit in the palm of your hand and have ceramic bearings to support the 90K RPM speed of the turbines. They are simply amazing and they run off Jet Fuel or kerosene. Pricing has come down a lot for the turbine engines, they are down in the 3K $ range now.

The hobby of RC planes or helis is as bad an addiction as owning a Hummer and nearly as expensive. I remember back in 2002 I had a bad year flying my big glow helis. I had 5 crashes in about 4 months and each crash was in the $500-$700 range for repairs. It can get expensive.

I've always wanted a Heli... I just never commited to it...  I've dropped thousands into my Xmods... and they aren't even anything special.
 
My F-150 drag truck and my 3 H2's are my favorites but I have others.

Hey Dooks....Guess what I got today?
 
My wife knows I wanted to get into this stuff, so for my B-day she bought me a remote-controlled Transformers Helicopter
 
I'm charging it now.  Oh the irony

quote:

ORIGINAL: HummerGuy

Hey Dooks....Guess what I got today?

My wife knows I wanted to get into this stuff, so for my B-day she bought me a remote-controlled Transformers Helicopter

I'm charging it now. Oh the irony

Thats great! Let us know how you like it.

This thing is a blast.  The dogs just look at it like WTF is that? My wife and family try to catch the thing then get freaked it its going to take a finger off.  They are more fun to mess with then the dogs   I flew it above their heads a few times and you swear they are getting chased by a swarm of bees
 
The flight time is about 15 to 20 minutes depending on how you fly it.  It's altitude and forward motion is controlled by the throttle.  They give you this little rubber weights to add to the nose to make it go faster, but they also weigh it down a bit.  All in all, it makes me feel like a little kid flying that thing around the house.  I've crashed it about 30 times already and it still works fine.  Good thing they sell the replacement rotors