Chris has summed it up well: "The beauty of indoor is that you can make it whatever want."
I do want to point out another issue. Aviation in general, and indoor in particular, demand a certain level of instinctive intuition to reach a high level of success. Some of us are boneheaded and spend countless hours to get there, others like David Yang arrive quickly, and still others never get it at all.
The community is for the most part helpful. That said, after your reach a certain level (and sometimes well before that), you can occasionally get "go stuff it" responses. I know I sure did on the road to my first F1D record. Fortunately a supportive wife and a very supportive flying buddy (Nick Ray), helped me get over it and pointed me in directions to drag more performance out of models which seemed completely maxed out. Along the way a few happy accidents led to performance improvements from design paths that had previously looked like dead ends. Make no mistake, from building my first F1D to setting that record probably entailed 2-3000 hrs of efforts. In that three years I probably made more F1D flights than most top indoor fliers make in their overall flying in ten years. Why all the effort? I wanted to be good at something. Did I succeed? Well, for a time I did. The benefits extended far beyond a hobby, and to be honest, after my first year of F1D it stopped being a hobby and became career development. Again, not for everyone. Probably not even for most.
It wasn't until 2016 that I actually bought indoor wood. Everything up to that point was either planed from hobby shop wood or made from a small stock of old Micro-X and MAL balsa sent to my by Steve Fauble in 2012. You don't need the absolute best wood out there to build great models. My 275 mg EZB built in early 2012 was made entirely from hobby shop wood, and not even stuff of the truly great stiffness coefficients. I built four props, all in the 55-65 mg range, from 6lb C grain shavings that I recently measured as being .0035-.006" thick. Frankly I have only ever seen one commercially produced sheet of wood anywhere that was even close to the transparency of those shavings. I haven't flown EZB since 2013 because the realization hit me that things had gotten a little too ridiculous. Maybe I'll try it again now that I have a small collection of at least slightly better wood thanks to three separate estate sales.
As to rubber... The 5/99 situation certainly is not good, and will probably remain so, but as others have said, 10/97 is readily available. Those wanting 10/97 should contact me privately as I have enough to share. Two of my current records were set using 02/13 TSS, and I had several 14+ minute Cat I half motor flights under the old F1D rules on this batch. Should you go buy some? Absolutely, unequivocally, NO! If you want good rubber for cheap, buy post-2013 TSS. It's good stuff, and stable. The pre 2014 batches have very high energy capacity but are unstable and prone to breaking for no reason. Also be careful about aging it; my 2013 rubber has become more unstable as time has gone on. I'm hopeful that 6/16 and others will not do this.
Further tidbits: my Cat I and II F1R records list 5/99 as the rubber. I pulled that motor from a bag of unlabeled rubber that appeared to be quite good. Later testing showed it definitely is not 5/99, and more likely is just some really good 10/97. Food for thought.
I had a Cat I F1R flight a couple weeks ago that did about 24:30 on TSS rubber. I won't say how many turns were left, but it was enough to make the wheels in my head start turning. The air wasn't great and the roof wasn't warm, so I assume that's why the torque bled off so quickly. Either way, great times are possible on batches that many perceive as unable to compete with 5/99. All that said, 5/99 is the only rubber I'd trust in Slanic. I haven't had good results from other batches in such cold conditions (TSS absolutely goes to pot in cold weather). Hindsight is that the small amount of 10/97 I had in Slanic might have been able to do something decent, but I made a very long series of stupid mistakes there thanks to tunnel vision over what works.
-Joshua Finn
Received on Tue May 16 2017 - 12:49:39 CEST
This archive was generated by Yannick on Sat Dec 14 2019 - 19:13:48 CET