If you get it right the torque burner works almost as well as a VP prop. The master of this was Brett Sanborn who won by a large margin at the Michigan state in his Senior year.
I played with it after he showed me what he was doing and converted a SO model and used it to fly against Brett at a cloudbuster flying night and got close to his times but did not match them. It is not hard to do but if the model is not competitive it will not do miracles. I added between 30 and 45 seconds to the times I could do without it.
What Brett did was put 2 music wire pins projecting below the motor stick about 1/2 inch. When he wound he placed a piece of tubing between the motor strands dividing the stretched motor in 1/3rds before winding. The motor was then wound as usual but without any back off. When hooking up the wound motor the tubes are placed over the pins and pulled out of the motor allowing the motor turns to grip the pins. After launch the front 1/3 of the motor unwound climbing to the ceiling ( like flying with a partial motor) when the front turns were gone the stress of the middle part of the motor caused it to pop off of the pin and that part of the motor powered the model and then the 3rd part did the same. Sort of like having 3 partial motors. By playing with the location of the tubes you can control the climb and cruise quite well.
I only tried this at one flying session and only used one pin and had a fun messing with it, but since I am many decades too old for SO I did not pursue it any further.
I was hoping Brett would answer this question but he must be busy a school.
Fred Tellier
----- Original Message -----
From: calgoddard
To: Indoor_Construction_at_yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2007 3:56 PM
Subject: [Indoor_Construction] Re: Torque Burners
Soccers56:
I recall this magical device. I spent quite a bit of time trying to
find it.
As I understand it, the torque burner somehow prevents high initial
rubber motor torque from causing your plane to hit the ceiling, and
somehow "saves" this torque for later in the flight, e.g. during the
descent, so that you have a longer overall flight time than without
the torque burner.
I finally ran across a drawing of such a device (can't remember
where it is) that used some sort of pin that went between the
strands of the rubber loop and dropped out when the initial winds
were gone.
I was skeptcial, and asked our local experts about this torque
burner. They were quite amused. They said stick with the tried and
true methods for achieving max duration, i.e. optimum trimming,
proper matching of rubber and prop, optimum winding for a no-touch
flight based on the torque vs winds curve of the batch of rubber you
are using for the contest, etc.
If you find the magical torque burner, and get it to work, let us
all in on the secret.
Be careful. The term "torque burner" is used loosely. For example,
the ribbon drop mechanism used in the ribbon drop bonus of SciOly
(in 2005 and 2006) might be referred to as a torque burner of sorts,
although not intended for that purpose. I recall plans being
included for this device in an SO kit. It was on a loose
small piece of paper included in the kit, and the design was not
indicated on the airframe plans. The kit never referred to this
ribbon drop mechanism as a torque burner. It was simply there to
let the ribbon drop a pretermined amount of time into the flight.
Best of luck to you in the SciOly competition.
Calgoddard
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Received on Tue Jan 09 2007 - 15:26:28 CET
This archive was generated by Yannick on Sat Dec 14 2019 - 19:13:44 CET