Re: [MMMFreeFlight] Re: A-6 poll update

From: Bill Gowen <wdgowen_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 6 Feb 2010 11:55:30 -0500

Jerry
There is a problem with your reasoning about the minimum weight eliminating any problem about what covering is used. Last year I built 2 sets of flying surfaces for my A6 - one CP covered and one for a club experiment to allow plastic. For the plastic covered set I used Penny Plane Plastic from Roy White which is the most economical indoor film available. The difference in the weight of the paper covered wing and stab and the PPP covered wing and stab is .25 grams.

To understand what this means you have to look at the difficulty of building a 1.2 gram A6. For my current A6 the amount of weight that I have left over from my CP covered wing and stab, my best prop and a motor stick suitable for high ceiling flying is 80 mg. So this is what I have left for a 10" tailboom. If you looked at my 80 mg boom you probably wouldn't believe that the model could fly. I recently put a new boom on the model and found the old one had been broken and repaired 7 times.

So if I had another 250 mg to put into the structure of my model a lot of changes could be made that would result in a stronger model with a larger prop as well. A larger prop would mean lower RPM's which would mean shorter motors and less motor tangles which is the major issue with A6's.

The idea for limiting film to grocery bags or dry cleaning bags would eliminate the advantage that indoor films would provide. This would be very easy for any indoor CD to police. Even the heaviest of indoor films has a very different appearance from grocery or dry cleaning bags. One person has suggested that another way to restrict the legal covering would be to require some of the original store printing to be included on the model.

The current discussion does not address the issue of types of plastic that might be allowed. If Don's rules proposal is amended to allow plastic covering then I hope another discussion will be started to restrict the types of plastic allowed so that current models will not be made instantly obsolete. At the same time I'm salivating over the possibility of designing an A6 covered with indoor film!
Received on Sat Feb 06 2010 - 08:55:34 CET