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Our club, SEFLI, has a series of Summer long events, contests, that concentrate on a particular model/kit: The Terry, the SlowStick and now, the Multiplex EasyStar. I don’t take part in the events except to spot and time other members. When the EasyStar was announced as the model for the 2006 Summer season, I was not impressed, having seen one fly during the winter. Then Bob Erbe brought one of the first club EasyStars to the field. It was quite impressive, turning easily (more on that below) and handling the wind well, too. I decided to try one.

When Bob was flying his he complained about its being hard to turn. He handed the transmitter to me for a try. My automatic reaction was to fly it with small inputs and it turned just fine. I pointed that fact out to him and when he tried it he agreed that slamming the sticks to turn didn’t work nearly as well as just taking it easy. My guess is that the fin/rudder works more as an airfoil with small inputs and like a brake with large ones. The plane certainly turned differently with the two techniques.

After seeing a few videos on the Ezone, I decided that since I wouldn’t be competing, I’d use more power (than the club rules allowed) in my version. I had a Mega 16/15/6 brushless and hooked it up with a Castle Creations 25 amp controller and powered it with a 3 cell Thunder Power PL2100mah battery pack. There was some wire lengthening necessary to get everything in and working but nothing difficult. The radio is a Spektrum A6000 operating on 2.4Ghz with a converted JR 6102 transmitter. The propeller is a 7×5 APCE cut down to a 6″ diameter. The servos are Hitec HS 81s hooked up with Sullivan cables.

I had some fun painting it up with spray cans and paper masks.

How does it fly? Great! Lot’s of power, mostly half throttle, even for large loops. It will roll - really long rolls - fly inverted easily and it does nice outside loops. It may become a favorite.

The Blade XL, an EPP foam 3D plane is large, light and from all evidence flies well. This “kit” came from Northeast Sailplanes, aka Sal. Even though it’s an ARF (Almost Ready to Fly) it is not a plane to be assembled without some experience. Things could go wrong for anyone without knowledge of EPP, hook ups and an ability to improvise.

The kit I received had a decoration scheme I truly didn’t like. I began work on the plane by painting it with many coats of white spray paint; it barely covered the sinful color scheme. I’d rather fly heavy than have a plane not look so good; say no more.

The nose was rebuilt with a 5/16″ diameter carbon tube inserted through the front of the fuselage for reinforcement. Probing into the rear of the fuselage I found that some plugs in the rear bulkheads had not been removed. When I took them out I was trying to figure out how to improve the front, firewall of the plane. One of the plugs fit perfectly onto the nose and so was epoxied in place to act as a backup for the fiberglass firewall; it gave the plane a porcine aspect (however, hopefully, it will fly like a bird). The motor, a Hacker A30-12XL was mounted on the kit firewall and rubber banded into place, the bands looping around the 5/16″ carbon tube through the front end.

Most of the plane was assembled according to the instructions with very few changes though due to the translation, it was a struggle. The Hacker will be powered by a 4S 2100 TP Prolite pack controlled by a Jeti 40 amp opto controller. A Ubec will feed the receiver from the flight pack. The propeller for first flights will be an APC 14 x 7E. The receiver is a Berg 5 channel controlling ailerons, elevator and rudder.

Strike #10 from the list of incompletes, the Pulsar aka Simply the Best is ready to fly. The only damage from its test flight crash was a small dent in the “D” tube of the wing at the center mounting peg, not worth trying to fix. The fuselage has now been faired into a 30mm spinner and painted with a rubbed out finish of red Krylon.

The wing tips were (as purchased) covered with a pretty apple green film that was almost invisible when the plane was up high, reducing the visibility of the plane by the area of the tips. They have now been recovered in the same red as the rest of the wing - seeing it is much easier now.

The motor, a Razor 2500 with a CC 25 amp ESC/BEC turned a 9″ x 6″ folding prop for the test flight. Next flight, with a draw of 12.5 amps on the 3S 1320 TP Prolite pack, will be with a Freudenthaler 10″ x 7″. The radio is a 4 channel Berg controlling the motor and a mixed V-tail.

There are too many unfinished projects in my workshop. Items No. 7 & 8 are being worked on actively. My plans are to expand on their assemby here, with pictures, as work goes forward. Here’s the list:

1 - An RBC kit from the Netherlands of a model called the Microbe. It’s a small takeoff on a Clancy Speedy Bee. It’s covered and just needs final assembly and painting.

2 - A rebuilding of Tom Hunt’s Ellipstik as ARFed by Sal at NES. I bought it from Tom, warped and holey; after straightening it out I started to recover it but it’s on a shelf.

3 - Two Zagis with modified wing structure. One to be a pusher (like the stock Zagi) and the other a tractor (as an experiment).

4 - An old timer, a Quaker Flash, “shrunk”, from a Flyline Kit - waiting to be covered.

5 - A flat foamie original 3D type design, ready to assemble and finish.

6 - An Aveox Embat - built and partially assembled, ready to cover.

7 - A Blade XL with the world’s ugliest predone decoration scheme. It’s progressing slowly with light coats of white Krylon H2O and alcohol based white spray primer being applied to tone down the original paint.

8 - An Eflite MiniFuntana, slowly but surely coming together. The motor mount has been a major project, installing a Mega 16/15/3 in a ModelAirTech belt drive gear box (3.33:1). Some day it will fly, hopefully soon.

9 - A scale model of a German 1930’s low wing trainer, the Klemm 125(?). It’s all framed up but in the intense flurry of building it I invented an impossible Rube Goldberg contraption to direct the controls of the tail feathers. The model was put aside until sanity returned but so far it’s still out of town.

10 - The smaller Pulsar glider with a vee tail has been flown but suffered a bit from an encounter with a tree. It’s undergoing repairs, epoxy is setting and it will be airborne again, soon. It’s powered by a Razor 2500 with a 4.4:1 gear box with a 9″x 6″folding propeller. It goes up real well, glides, glides, glides and finds thermals all by itself. The damage it suffered in the crash was surprisingly light.

Mike Glass has a new foamie he’s calling the B&W Matrix. It’s made with black and white foam used in a really ingenious way to give the plane its unique look and its structure. There was more to see about Mike’s plane at his website but he’s closed that down now and gone out of business.

Mike brought it out to the field Sunday and put it in the hands of Rick Casella to have it wrung out. They worked all day fine tuning, cutting foam and getting it to do its best. Alan Wander brought his (he and Mike built it the night before) and flew it as well. Mike and Rick had the prototype flying beautifully by the end of the day.

My latest building project is Gary Wright’s Mini E3D. The kit was started a few weeks ago and has progressed to covering. How was the kit? Just fine except for a few little things involving the fuselage side balsa, the strip wood and a few places that had to be watched to ensure an accurately built framework.

The two fuselage sides were made from very different pieces of balsa. One side was stiff, heavy “C” grain and the other was very light and soft “A” grain. After testing them alongside each other for stiffness, some thin CA was run along the length of the “A” grain piece and hit with accelerator. That stiffened it up considerably. Assembling the fuselage required close attention to keeping it straight and aligned. In spite of that attention it came together a bit off but some soaking in acetone loosened things up and allowed it to be trued. Lesson learned: The stabilizer should be aligned with the wing before the fuselage is finally glued together.

The strip wood was quite curvey but there was enough with the kit and in the backup bins (Thank you, Aerocraft) to overcome what could have been a frustrating experience. Even wood that looked straight when picked soon warped in the summer humidity.

The paper/phenolic tubes that support the aluminum wing connecting tube allowed the wing to be twisted and for the twist to be held long enough to glue in an undesireable warp. Again, acetone loosened things up so the warp could be removed; the situation was carefully watched and controlled on the second wing.

The “cabin” framing was reinforced to keep wrinkles out of the covering. The only other modifications were to adjust the servo supports and openings to adapt to Hitec Hs55 servos. This involved some pieces of scrap balsa and a bit of fuss; no big deal.

As the plane neared finishing, a few things came up that required rethinking. It was difficult to balance with the battery (TP2000 Prolite, 3S1P) at the front of the provided ply strip. A ply insert was cut to fill the area up to the underside of the nose with slots for a hook & loop strip to wrap the battery as well as an extension of the hook material. The receiver was difficult to reach when it was mounted all the way to the rear so it was moved up. An RCDirect stick on antenna was installed along the side of the fuselage.

When I loaded Element to go to the field the first few times, planes were spread all around on the rear floor and I realized I was driving with a big mess in the back. Getting everything in and out was hard on my back and the planes. I tried putting the planes up on the folded seats but if the windows were open they blew around. Time to design.

The box is made out of blue foam. The bottom is made from 1 1/2″ blue insulating foam that had been laying around the shop and the rest is from 1″ foam purchased for the box. It required less that half of a 2ft. x 8ft. sheet. Deciding on the dimensions of the box required measuring the car and the planes.

The planes were propped up on scrap lumber and measured to determine how deep the box had to be so that the planes could be supported by the sides and the slots in the sides. The width of the box is wider than the maximum propeller diameter (by a few inches) that might be on any plane in the box combined with clearance for any servos in the wings (for ailerons). The length (the longest dimension) of the box was determined by the space between the wheel wells in the back of the car.

Once the box was assembled the planes were propped up in place again to determine spacing that would allow the maximum number of planes and the least chance of damage when they were loaded and removed. The slots for the wings were cut with a very thin Japanese saw. The other cuts were made with a 1 1/2″ putty knife that was filed sharp along one edge. The putty knife would work for the slots too but it was more awkward to use than the saw. The slots were angled slightly; this made enough additional space for one more small plane.

All the pieces that were cut away to make the slots were (luckily) saved. When When the box was first loaded in the shop it turned out that some of the wing slots were too deep so pieces of the removed material were glued back in to move the bottom of the slots up. There were wide slots cut on one end to accept my Hell Raiser (biplane). After the HR was lost, the scrap was glued back in and new slots cut to accept the Mini E3D wing. The scraps were offset from the main sides of the box to allow the foam box sides to support the Mini E3D wing at its ribs rather than on the covering.

The wood strips inside the box (running vertically between the slots) are paint stirrers glued in place. They firm up the sides which were too flexibly fragile after the slots were cut. The thicker bottom piece was used to provide more resistance to moving objects and to make it easier to glue the box together. It’s held together with PL Premium polyurethane glue, applied with a caulking gun. PL is inexpensive (less than $4.00 for a tube) and is the same stuff as Gorilla glue but thicker. It can be thinned with a solvent like mineral spirits to make it brushable.

The first time the box was put into the Element it wouldn’t fit; it was too wide for the space at the door. After messing with it, it went in by starting with one end in and forcing the other end past a door-holding loop that was in the way; the groove made by the loop in the foam was not a problem and the box goes in easily now.

After using the box for a while I’m quite happy with it. I recently realized that if the wing spans of the planes I’m carrying are less than the space between the folded-up seats or the space without the seats, the box can be turned at a right angle and equipment cases can go to either side of the box. A small plane like the Microstick can be placed in the bottom of the box (under the larger planes). I avoid putting anything heavy in the bottom of the box; that could be a disaster waiting for a curve in the road. So far, so good.

The photo on the left shows the box across the Element with the seats folded up to the sides; the one on the right shows the box placed front to back with the seats out. There are seven planes in the car (six in the box including a Mini Stick and a V-tailed glider) with room for a few more. My Flickr log has larger, sharper versions of the same photos.