Ep 2 - What's What (Understanding all of the Hobby Lingo)

Welcome back to the aviation RC News Podcast. You found us. My name is Matt. And I’m Joe. We’re here to be with you along in your adventure to RC airborne proficiency. So buckle in. Let’s take off. Welcome to episode two. What’s? What? And we’re going to get into here and we’re going to start like we want to start every episode with kind of recapping what we’ve done since we last talked. For us. That was Christmas. New Year’s Eve. Eve is the last time we talked. And right now, it’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Or just about. And so that gives us a couple of weeks of time to do things. So I had been working on a number of projects, closing up a forum challenge in the Flight Test community, and so I had made three different designs actually, sorry, five different designs since that time. If anybody’s familiar with the Bird of Time. Bird of Time is a 118 inch wingspan glider. It’s massive, it flies great, everybody loves it. Who has one? It seems oftentimes if they give it up, it’s because it’s just too big and cumbersome. And ever since, I think Flight Test highlighted it when I was watching those videos, avidly still do, but some of the earlier videos, they have one on it. And I looked at the bird, I was like, oh my gosh, that’s so beautiful. I need to get my one of them. So I looked around and at the time they were out of print. You could get a plan, but you couldn’t get a Balsa kit. Or if you could get a kit, that was all you could get was a Balsa kit or ready to fly anyway. So it was really hard to find any. And anytime you found a kit, it was on back order or not to be ever returned again. So I said, you know, maybe I could build one of those myself. At least that’s what I thought way back. And after a couple of years of building, I said, I think I could do it. I think I know how. So as part of this design challenge to go turn also builds into foam, I took on this one as a challenge I started a while back. I just kind of brought it to the forefront to see if I could finish the project at Flight Fest this last year. So Flight Fest 19, I took it out in the field. There’s a big cross breeze and as I’ve released it, all I had was tail and elevator and no. So it had rudder an elevator, sorry. And it had no alarm because for some reason the surface weren’t working, I guess, at the time. So I just forgot about it. Anyway, tipped over, hit the ground on the wing and basically did a cartwheel across the field for a little bit. It busted the shaft on the motor and a couple other malabies that I since fixed so I got that fixed up and I took it out to the field. Now I have got a really tiny car. So 118 inch wingspan craft takes up more than I think my car can handle. That’s right at ten foot. Yeah, that’s ten foot. And my car can’t fit and it barely fits an eight foot board of lumber in the car itself. So what I did is I designed it so that I could take out the wing tip sections and have the center it’s like a 45 ft to 50 foot inch section in the middle and I kind of folded the wings in almost like you call it like the corsair goal wings kind of would fold in, right? So it was a similar kind of deal. They’d fold on top of each other and that was easy to transport. That same distance is about as big as a fuse. Elage was I think that’s like 48 inches. That’s 4ft. Those sit comfortably in the front seat. So I brought it up to the field, I got it all set up and I let loose and the repaired bird flew pretty good. At first I had required something like two and a half pounds of ballast, which for a really heavy, really light plane, that’s a ton of ballast. I really wasn’t expecting that. So on my initial launch, ballast is basically counterweight to make sure it balances. Okay. Sorry about that. And then what I ended up doing as I threw it, that ballast, £1 of it came off the front nose that was basically rubber banded on. So then it started a porpoise and it would basically zoom down, gain some speed and then of course the way the CG was set up, it would basically then start climbing again, installing because you were essentially tail heavy at that point. Very tail heavy. Not just tail heavy, very tail heavy. Short my mic liner, huh? I suppose so. Which is why I was so amazed when you told me you got it to the ground the first time. Anyway, so eventually I was trying to save it. I was trying to get it so that it would come to the ground, write it, like as it came down and got some speed before it started to tip up again, install. I was hoping it would come down and almost like kind of scrape along the ground and maybe bring it that way. But as luck would have it, I missed that opportunity. It went up, installed and went nose first in the ground, like literally like a javelin straight into the ground. But it turned out that it really wasn’t terribly busted up. The nose had kind of split open a little bit, but I had strapping tape, which is basically single direction fiber reinforced packing tape and so it basically kind of wrapped the nose and brought that up to speed. I just double checked all the other surfaces which were all in good shape. Everything else was in working order, except one of the Aloron arms had kind of snapped. And so one of the ailerons wasn’t working, but it was only using one of the wingtip surfaces to roll. But as I’ve learned in the past, reading other people’s things like, oh, that’s plenty, especially in that plane, there’s plenty of wing surface. So I knew it wasn’t going to be very quick on the roll, but it was still going to be able to roll and that would be enough to kind of keep it level when it started to kind of get off. So I was like, okay, we’ll do it again. Let’s give it another try. So I threw it again. I was like, yes. And so it took off. My hand flew beautifully for about 100ft. I tried to bring it around left and I was filming it, so I was trying to bring it back in frame as it fly it past. So as it turned the right wing tip, the tape that was holding the goal wing down, let go. And so the right wing tip just folded back in and basically was fluttering vertical as the rest of the craft was trying to keep. So at that point, I’m doing as much left roll as I possibly can to kind of stabilize the craft. And it’s just and that came down those first again, I was like, but it flew. It flew beautifully. Until the tape no, it didn’t. Until the tape gave way. Yeah, until it didn’t, as it always is. Right. So from that I decided there’s a couple of small weak points that I noticed, but most of the plane is in really pretty good shape. I’m trying to redo a couple pieces of it, but I can’t wait to get that back up in the air. So that was a successful maiden. I have what I call the flying camper. It’s a Remington brunelli, too. You can look it up on Wikipedia. And it’s basically a flying wing biplane from the 1920s. And it started to be some of the first airliner because at that point there really weren’t too many planes that were big enough to be able to carry that much weight. So anyway, so the rington and Brunelli was something that I kind of put together. I thought it was really neat craft. I put these plants together and I told someone I’m like, you might need to build this. And then after a little bit, I got a kind of wild hair and took one night and built it half scale using half size foam from the dollar. Generally have like a 330 2nd thickness foam, which is exactly half of what the flight test dollar tree foam board stuff is. So I built it and I’ve been trying to get it to fly the first time, it basically did a series of back flips, which means it was really tail heavy and being a biplane. It has a very short distance to the front of the nodes, which means you don’t have a lot of room to balance the plane out. I did it again after repairing some things and it flew, but it was pretty tailheavy and very hard to control. But I did manage to bring it down. I kind of busted the firewalls on it and I’ve since repaired that. So I’m ready to get that back out and flying. But it flew, which is cool. It just didn’t fly well. So I’m going to give that a go in a little bit. But I flew that. If anybody has followed some of the papers on the Mars lander for NASA, what they’ve discovered is they’ve done a lot of testing on a 1930s design from Mr. Brandall, who gave some of the founding information and design work for almost all the modern aircraft and airfoils. And he had a different idea, is if you take the wing and kind of twist it at the tip a little bit forward, you can get rid of the tendency a plane has to turn out. Like so as you’re kind of coming around to turn, the upper wing tends to kind of kick back, which means the whole plane starts going up, which is something that tends to cause it to stall, which can be dangerous in certain circumstances. But every plane has this tendency. Currently, the Pandal D wing, rather than slowing down, ends up actually creating a little additional thrust and brings that wing tip forward. So it actually brings the plane around in a turn, allowing you to not need rudders and things like that to keep it doing what it is I was going to say, because what you’re talking about, it sounds like, I guess, aerodynamic slip. Exactly. Is that what you’re referencing? More or less, yes. Right. And it’s kind of allowed to slip, but what it’s doing is as it’s kind of slipping sideways, it’s still yawing in the direction of the turn as opposed to outward of the direction of the turn. What it normally does is adverse yaw. So it goes against the yaw that you want and as opposed to pro verse, which is in the direction of the yaw you want. So, like, while it’s rotating and turning into rotating towards a turn, the aircraft is not trying to fight it, it’s actually working with it and going towards it. It also moves the wing tip vortices. So where the wing lift portion stops is actually about three quarters to 80% of the way out towards the end of the wing, which is not at the wingtip, but it’s actually in a bit. And what that does, it helps reduce vortices, that help reduce drag. And it does a couple of different interesting things. And one of the guys, Alan Bowers, tried this at NASA and he’s like, I’m looking at the models, I’ve made models and they work. I’ve tried a bunch of different things. I think I found the optimal one. And so he has a program with a bunch of interns that he’s tried it out and it works like it works really well actually. He’s got a bunch of papers. You can go take a look at it. I urge you to. It’s a brand old D wing from NASA. Anyway, so I looked at that, I looked at all the research. Obviously I spent a little bit time down that rabbit hole and I said, you know, I’m going to make a phone version of that because that’s really cool. So I designed one, I figured out a way to build that twist in the wing in a somewhat repeatable way and I took it out in front of my house and I threw it across my yard. So with a gentle toss and a good balance it will glide beautifully and it’s very stable. It’ll self stabilize because it has a slight dihedral which is basically a bend upward in the wing so that forces equal out and it has of course the proverb shaw. So anytime it starts to slip in one direction, it won’t stall out, it’ll continue and then flow down that direction which is really cool. So I put a motor on it and I tried to fly it a couple of different times. First time it was way too windy and it basically went straight up in the thing and went down like an arrow and cracked in half when it hit the ground. So I had to rebuild it or repair it, at least this time I flew it and I think I had the thrust angle wrong. So I had the way the motor was pushing the aircraft and it basically went up and came straight back down and nearly came at my head. So I ducked quick and it crashed into the ground. And then the repairs I thought were it’s time to build a new one. So that’s one of those ones that I wanted to I gave a try to fly and that was a very quick flight, probably about 2 seconds. And by flight I mean it went up and back and literally went back in my head and into the ground. So I pulled up a picture of your that you’re talking about. I’m kind of looking at pictures of it and you were talking about, I guess you were flying on windy day. The design of that plane, just because the wings are so big, it is basically just a wing. It looks like it would be really susceptible to cross breezes. Yeah, I don’t know, I mean, I don’t think I got it flying quite right. I had it close and in some classes, especially flying wings, they’re very sensitive to CG location so when they’re off it’s a big problem and I know thrust lines can play a big role into that and I think I just wasn’t paying so close attention to it as I thought I needed to. So anyway, I gave it another shot, and there’s actually somebody else on the forums who saw what I was doing, and he’s also making a different attempt. His glide flights have proven very successful, like mine. He said that he noticed when he started giving a little bit more speed, it would start to get a little squirrely. So he’s thinking kind of a low, slow, phi kind of prop with he working on the low end and just basically keep it in the air so we’ll see. And kind of in that same vein of the wing twist, I’m working on a craft called the Mara, and that’s the Balsa challenge, another Balsa challenge plane, along with the wind freak I’ll talk about in a second. The Mara is basically a it looks like I call it the flying mustache, I think is my nickname for it, because if you look at it, it’s man alive. It looks like Yosemite Sam’s mustache in plan form. So in the top view and but the wings, they curl up at the end as well as they tilt forward, so they twist like the wing forward as well as kind of coming up at the wingtips. So it kind of creates a little bit of an extra drag. And those wing tips are well behind the CG of the craft, so well behind the balance point. And that kind of is how wings tend to be stable. They tend to have a little bit of extra drag behind the center of gravity, like an arrow. The fletching on an arrow, they tend to keep the arrow in the right direction because the drag forces are far behind the CG. So the wing tips on these things kind of act, it looks like, in that same way, but all it has is a rudder. It literally fuselage with a single rudder piece, and there’s no other controls on it at all. So I think what it does is you put the rudder and basically kind of will yaw you and tilt you in the direction you want to be going. And you can just go back and forth like that. And otherwise it’s going to self stabilize, it’s going to positive or provers yaw into the turn, as well as just look really cool in the air. It’s just a beautiful looking bird. So I decided I want to try to tackle it. And it has a new build technique I use. It’s pretty cool. I’m excited about it. The glide test was, again, like, the printal T is beautiful. Once it’s balanced, it was just great. So I just built a bungee cord launch, a high start launch. So I’m looking forward to giving that a try, probably tomorrow if I can, if the wind isn’t too crazy and that’s a glider. And then the wind freak is basically the trial version to see if I can do something similar to the moral because it uses a lot of kind of bending a foam board to curl it into the shape you want. For the Mara, the wind freak has a very gentle curve to it. And so that was kind of an initial test. And it’s a planker. Planker is kind of like basically just a wing with a little bit of a fuse that sticks out to balance it. And it’s just a glider. You just hurl it up in the air and it’s nothing but wing. So once if you catch any thermals, it’s going to catch it and you’re going to be able to hang out up there for a long while. People who fly those kind of planes really kind of enjoy them. And I’ve noticed I enjoy gliders a lot more than I thought I would, so I’m trying a couple of these out. So anyway, that was a pretty successful deal. It tends to be like most wings, very touchy to center, gravity changes. The couple of launches that I’ve done across the yard were beautiful when they were right and almost catastrophic when they were wrong. Usually the only thing that survives when it fails, as it did last weekend, the only thing that seems to survive is the wing. The fuse cracked in half, and it’s a hot mess, and you can’t always glue that back together anyway. But those are things I flew, I gave a chance at. Most of them were pretty successful, followed by a little bit more aggressive test that ended up being somewhat unsuccessful, but a lot of positive tastes. The flight there, that gives me a lot of encouragement as well as proven that the designs that I put together, anybody can build them, the plans work, and that when they build the craft, they’ll have something that should fly if they get the balance right. And I know, Joe, you just started, and I think you crashed the two craft that you had before you had a glider and you had a delta wing little glider, and I think both of those you said perished over the previous weeks right before we talked last time. So is there anything that you flew this time around? No, unfortunately there’s nothing that I’ve been able to fly just because I haven’t had anything built. And even if I did, the past couple of weekends have been kind of rough weather, nasty or warm, but lots of breezes. It’s a bit of weird weather here in south right now. Yeah, sure have. In lieu of things that I built or sorry, things that I’ve flown, because I haven’t flown anything. You were talking about your bird of time and your RB two, and I had some questions or the I had a question that popped into my head for each of those and so made a little note here I wanted to ask you since I don’t have anything to talk about. Having flaming your bird of time, you’re talking about the wings ended up collapsing on you because you’re doing, for storage purposes the ability to, I guess, cut the tape and fold the wing up so it fits into the car. Exactly, I understand. Right. So there’s the tape along the top I don’t cut, and all of the other tape, I just basically kind of roll it up on the one piece of it and then the other. That way it’s not attached along the bottom and so it kind of hinges on the top tape, which may be not the best choice of where to put the hinge on that part. I originally had it set up so that there’d be two carbon fiber tubes and then basically like an alignment shaft or an alignment, maybe craft stick or two or something like that, so that when I put them together, they all line up. That felt kind of flimsy, the way I don’t know, something hadn’t worked out right. It didn’t feel as strong as I felt like it might need to be. But I might go back to that because I think that’s probably the most promising that’s how it’s been designed, but I think it’s the most promising method of keeping the wings sturdy and on and not folding while it’s flying. And I thought that popped into my head. Remember when you saw the wing of my glider? I don’t know if you remember the strut that I had in there. Four pieces of foam board sandwiched together and actually wrapped in an attempt of a square frame. Right. And then you have to put that into a two that it would slide into. All that ended up just getting glued together. It’s a solid piece because it ended up only being 6ft wingspan as opposed to the nine foot that I was in my mind did not seem as big as nine foot really is 9th foot is massive when you’re like, oh, my God, what am I doing? Like, the whole time I’m building this plane, I’m like, this is and it turned out beautiful. Like, picture perfect. The fuselage looked exactly like the bird. I mean, it worked out perfect. I really couldn’t have asked for anything better. But as I’m building, I’m like, this plane is massive. This plane is just ginormous. 10ft is no joke. Yeah. Wow. And so when I was building that glider, of course, I’m sitting here and I got sheets of foam sitting next to me. I’m looking at it, it’s like, okay, yeah, it’s like two X three sheet of foam. You’re looking at it’s like, that’s not all that big in your head. When you’re like, I’ll put two or three of those side by side, you’re like, it’s only going to be so much bigger than that. It’s not that you’re taking into account the full size of it. So when I was looking at doing three pieces to the wing and being nine foot, it didn’t seem anyway, so my thought was, or my potential suggestion go ahead. I’m sorry to interrupt. You were mentioning that I think the way your wing section is set up basically took the 20 inch width of a normal foam board and you basically folded that into a wing shape. So your cord or your front to back distance was somewhere around like ten inches. Right. It was on my head. Basically, each segment of the wing was a full sheet of foam. Right. I measured it out and planned it out and did my 50% scores, which then I took a pin. I ended up using a pin, basically, and ran inside that cut to kind of flatten the foam out so it could allow multiple cuts a couple of inches apart, roll the front of the wing. Exactly. And that’s the standard, I’ll call it the traditional standard flight test design methodology. And it’s very effective at creating slight bends. We’re talking like 15 degree from flat bends and being sturdy. And you can put a little glue in there and have it be just very solid, as well as keep the rigidity of the foam board because you’re not having to remove any paper so all the way through. That’s the truth. But that design method is really simple. It’s easy to accomplish and repeat, but it’s sturdy and it still keeps the strength and some of the great pieces of why we would use dollar tree foam as opposed to something else. So you use that technique beautifully. I’m mentioning that it’s a flight test technique. For those who don’t know what that is, there’s a couple of different build styles out there, and that’s one of the ones that flight test champions. And it’s worked for me, I’ll tell you what. Yeah, I mean, it makes perfect airflow. It just works. And it’s easy enough to pull off. Now within that wing. Going all the way back within that wing. The intent was when it was going to be the three segments. Was that I would have a piece of long piece of foam cut to A and B fold up. Which. If you look at the flight test plans. They use A and B folds. Which is how they’re cutting slots out of the phone. Leaving the paper in place so that it can fold up and have the rigidity of the paper helping hold together. But I was going to form a square sheath that then those four pieces of foam glued together would slide into, and that was going to be the strut for the wing. And what I’m getting at is you’re talking about doing a hinge on your outer two pieces of the wings to hinge up. What if is it feasible within that build to maybe take where it’s hinging, cut that completely off, just cut the tape off, and you had to redo your wings, but put in that strut system where I ended up just saying, screw it, I’m stocking at 6ft and glued it all together. And you’d have to have better tolerances than what I was working with. But actually have it so that your wings pull out. Because that was my original plan. Was the two outer sections would pull out from the middle section. And then when I was ready for transport and when I was ready to fly. I would slide those in because the sheet was going to be the square. And then I had the inside section basically stuck out. We’d go into the inner part, the inner segment of the wing. It had a recipient anyway, that’s exactly actually how it’s designed. It’s designed to build a tube that’s slightly smaller than the six millimeter diameter air shaft that you use. And then, so you glue that up and you tape it. Depends on if you’re gluing it into the plane or not, or if you’re kind of sandwiching it. Anyway, point is, you make the tube and you kind of fit that in there and glue that in place. And then once it’s in place, that’s where the carbon fiber tube slides in and out. If that’s anchored well, that’ll hold your tube in place. Because while you’re flying, you’re not exerting any outward forces. You’re only exerting up and down. So the carbon fiber keeps that part in check. And then the friction from that tube that you made and the carbon fiber, that friction between the two will keep it in place. Plus, when you add a couple of strips of extra tape or velcro or something like that and I have velcro, which that technique didn’t work like I thought it would. There’s some piece of it that worked well, but it wasn’t the end result that I was hoping it would be. So I ended up kind of improvising a couple of things. That’s part of the reason why there was tape there, because the velcro wasn’t strong enough. So I went with a bunch of tape. And of course, the tape, after you’ve taken it on and off a handful of times, starts losing its stickiness. And that’s kind of what happened, which is why it gave way in the air. Plus, the bird of time has a great deal of lift. There’s such wing surface that it’s exerting probably £4 a pound and a half of force on the outside section of that wing, if not more, because of it turning and things like that. So I wasn’t thinking like £6 of force. You really need to do something a little bit heftier with this, Matt. So anyway, so I’m going to cut them apart. I’m going to reinstall the carbon fiber wings, carbon fiber spars like I had originally. And then I’m also going to take some I’m going to take some craft sticks and use that to basically keep the alignment of the wing. And I think between all those things, I’ll be able to put that back in the air. The. Other failure on that piece was the horizontal stabilizer. There are two rods that connect the two. I used bamboo sticks and Chinese chopsticks, I think, because they’re the right diameters, and I use that to kind of anchor the two pieces together. And apparently the piece they slide through creates a kind of a weak point, like a pressure point, and it failed there. So I just need to figure out how to reconnect those two pieces. It’s not really that big of a deal. I’d like to come up with, like, maybe steel pieces as much as I don’t want steel in the very tail section of the wing, because that makes it harder to balance. But I do need something that’s rigid enough. So maybe carbon fiber sparse. It’s just the tail section isn’t thick, so that makes it a little bit more challenging. Either way, I’ll figure it out. But the fact was that really, it worked. It worked well. What I was getting out with, the cord section, the bird of time, is a full 20 inch long, like, wide wing. So for the most part, it’s about an 18 or 15 inch deep wing. From front to back, it’s 15 inches. And in the knuckle part, I’ll call the knuckle, it’s like, 20 inches, and that tapers down to four or five inches. So it’s a massive wing. Like, the outer section is one whole piece of dollar tree foam board that is 20 x 30, except there’s, like, a tape. It’s got some shaping to it, but it’s pretty much one full section. Hopefully, when we come up for D and D this weekend, you’ll be able to show that one off. Oh, man. I’m hoping I’m lucky. I’ll get these projects that I’m working on now out of the way, and then I will have a little bit of time during the week to get that up and running. I’d love to fly that thing. It’s just so beautiful. Anyway, go ahead. Yep. Going on to the second question, then we can get further into the show. I had a question about your RV two, which you had an extended name that I don’t remember for it. It’s Remington Brunelli. B-R-U-N-E-L-L-I. So Mr. Remington and Mr. Brunelli. Brunelli is an airfoil designer who focused most of his career on lifting bodies. He just found flying wings and flying lifting body craft. Like, if you can have the body of the craft lift your plane, you can really do some heavy work, which can be the answer to a lot of our problems with how do we get things from here to there. So he focused a lot of his life on that, and I think that REM tin brunelli, too. The first one ended up crashing and killing everybody on board. I think it was just something went wrong and nobody made it so that he looked at it and redesigned it and rebuilt it and it ended up actually being a mobile car show. Car showroom. So they would have a I can’t remember Brueback. No, that doesn’t sound right, but it’s like a 1924 26 car that he would basically fly around the country and people come and see the car because in those days you only made a handful of it and it took forever to make. So when you had a car, you had to bring it around. So either you could drive it and hope it didn’t fall apart on you as a prototype, or you could bring it around places and then he said you could fly it. He’s got this great plane. The sides of it are crenulated, much like the insides of a corrugated piece of cardboard. Which also reminds me just by the general shape and the way the windows were and the crenalation not crenallation. The corrugation just led me to think of campers. Those teardrop shaped campers that you see right for those listening. I had seen something of the craft when I was at your place last. But just hearing you talk about I wasn’t really grasping what plane you’re talking about or what the design was. And then you’re talking about the lifting body. I would encourage listeners to go Google Arby Two or Remingtonbrewer Brunelli. B-R-U-N-L-E-L-L-I. It’s easy to get these things wrong, same as Prandilt. It’s prndtld. And Princeult is like one of the forefathers of all modern aviation in general. Like he came up with formulas and theories that have brought us through today’s aviation designs. So just one of those innovators is like he came up with this idea about twelve years later after coming up with the initial design, and everybody’s like, yeah, well, we don’t really care because what you came up with first works, so we’re going to keep with that. And that’s honestly the reason why almost all of our planes are the way they are is because of that 1920 design that he came up with. And he came through and he kind of revised it and just nobody bothered to check it until 1998 or 2007 or whatever the heck they first NASA started to do tests on this thing. It’s just crazy. So Google the RB Two plane and when you see the body of the thing, you understand what Matt’s talking about when he says lifting body or the shape that he was trying to describe, because I was having a hard time picturing it until I Googled it and I saw the picture. I was like, oh yeah, I remember that sitting on your table now. Yeah, and once you see it because it’s going to be hard to describe, you’re right, it does look like one of those two drop campers. It’s like somebody glued a large buy wing bomber onto the front of their big camper and put two engines on either side at the very front of it. It’s just ridiculous looking. I mean, it’s awesome. And honestly, it looks like it’s going to be a really fun plane to fly. When I get like, how in the world am I going to balance it? I’m literally just chucking money behind the engine to sell because I need more weight up front. That’s ridiculous. Anyway, we’ll see how it goes. Hopefully it’ll work out this weekend. I can show you when you come up next. So really quickly, the problem you brought up with has a short nose and it’s hard to see, gee, potentially, and I guess I should have a better look at the picture of it, but if it has horizontal stabilizers, does it have horizontal stabilizers? They’re tiny and in the back, as I say, could larger horizontal stabilizers, basically getting a bigger airflow in the back help counteract than a tail? Heavy nature on that craft. I don’t want to the aircraft of those days had, relatively speaking, they had very heavy engines, and their design was pretty lightweight in that it was typically they were using stick and silk, so they were using spruce, they’re using spruce wood to make the frame. And then they would coat it, they would cover it with silk. And then they would dope that silk with like almost like a glue or an epoxy that would basically cover up all the pores and smooth out. I mean, silk is already smooth, but it would smooth it out even more so that it would be more aerodynamic. And that’s how they’d make these planes back in those days. So the engines were really heavy, so they had to put them very close to the CG for them to even balance, because if they were much further out, it would be no heavy every single time. It’s just hard for us to, with RC equipment, the lightweight nature of it, to get a similar CG effect. Right. So what you’re doing is basically you’re scaling down this craft, but it didn’t have much room in front of the lifting spot in the plane, the lifting balance point in the plane. So there’s not a lot of room to put heavy stuff in front. The motors we use are pretty lightweight, relatively speaking. The only other really heavy thing we’ve got is either the gas that we use to power the gas, right. If we’re using a gas power plant, or if it’s electric, you got your battery and that’s it. And they’re pretty sizable, so you don’t have but like, in this case, I think I’ve got two inches to stick a battery that’s an inch and a half in width or height, and it’s like two to three inches long. So there’s almost no place to put the start thing in front of the center of gravity. And so you’re trying to balance out the whole rest of the plane with this giant paper weight in front. And of course, I’d like to try to have as much of the plane weight useful as possible. So if you’re going to stick £2 of something, stick £2 of battery. You get more flight time if you can, as opposed to just sticking a bunch of rocks and lead. But the good news is they’re not fuel tanks where the weight shifts as fuel depletes. Well, yeah, except if your battery slides out of its mooring and it starts to slip around. Anyway, I won’t get into my feelings moving off the flight section real quickly, Matthew, what’s currently on your work bench? Just kind of go down and check it off. What are you working on building right now? Oh, man. Okay, so we’ve talked about the birds that were successful. The other one I’m working on is a Chevrolet marketing S 55 X. It’s basically a double hull wing. I don’t know if it’s a wing. It’s basically an Italian watercraft that was used in World War II mainly for supplies. It was very versatile. And Balboa, he used these in a lot of his campaigns. He was one of the generals in the World War II and he was one of the Italian air generals. And then there’s a plane called the Minnemoa, which is kind of like a herf is one of the designers of these German gliding craft. And they kind of have this almost like goal wing knuckled, like the bird of time. And they just look really majestic. And so I wanted to see if I could build one. They’re typically in balsa plans look great. So I said, let’s we can make it as a foam board as part of this challenge. So I made one that was 50 inches. I tried to make one that was 30. That one didn’t turn out so good. And then I made one that was basically take the balsakit but cut those pieces out of foam board instead and skin it using wrapping paper effectively. So I’ve got those that they’re essentially finished. I just need to get them up in the air and see if I can control them. Either way, they’re pretty much good to go. And then I was working on the vault OS two U three. And I’m looking at the dash three version, which is it’s a kingfisher. And I’m doing kind of a rounded fuselage. I’m not making the square boxy looking thing. I’m actually doing it as a molded craft, effectively like a master series from Flight Test. It is the workhorse of the battleship. So these would be at the back of a battleship and they would catapult off and they would basically retrieve mail. They would serve as reconnaissance. They would also serve as target practice. While the battleships were doing their thing. For the people trying to learn how to use these anti aircraft guns that are on the side of the battleships, they would fly past and use those ships on the back of the plane. But of course, there’s no landing strip right on a battleship. So what the battleship would do is they would hear that the kingfishers are coming in to land, and they would basically turn the ship at a 45 or 30 degree angle, and the wake of the battleship would smooth the ocean out so that they could land in that strip of calm. And then they would basically drop a plate in the water that they would move the plane onto and then lift it back up and put it back in its catapult sling, ready for the next flight. And to get off on the catapult, they would rev it to full volume, and they’d be, like, locked in this catapult thing. And on the count of one, two, and boom. And they would literally have a round, almost like they would typically propel a round in the battleship to shoot somebody. They had a similar kind of charge that they would put in this catapult, and that would shoot the plane off of the catapult and then bring it to the lifting speed of 88 knots or something like that in a space of 80ft. So imagine you’re a pilot in this thing, and you’re revved all the way up and going, please don’t let go. Please don’t go. Because you’re not going to get enough speed to actually start flying by the time you hit the water without this charge. And then you just go, no go. And you give a thumbs up and you just crush your fingers. It’s amazing. The ingenuity people are like, we need planes out on these things, and they figured out a way. But I was on this battles at the USS North Carolina when I was out visiting with my mom. I was visiting Wilmington, North Carolina, and they have the USS North Carolina out there, and we’re checking out this thing, and I’m go, look at this battle, big guns. And then all of a sudden, what the heck is there a plane doing in the back of this thing? That’s ridiculous. So this is when I shortly had found out about flight test. So I started taking a bunch of pictures and just reading up on this thing. So I finally found a way I wanted to really capture this plane. I’m really excited about it. I love the model. The model turned out amazing. I’m going to show you kind of the preview of it there. I don’t know if you can see that, Joe. The contrast is bad, but yeah, I can see the general shape of it. It looks like it’s coming along okay. Yeah, let me see if I can just see what you’re looking at. The contrast is terrible. Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of white bloomed out, but yeah, that’s better. I Googled it and got a general idea. It’s coming along. I think the wingtip little pontoons are built, and I’ve got to put them in, and then I think it’s going to be ready for a maiden. I’m really excited about that one. So I think that was the one I was almost done with. So that’s the last one on my Luscombe silver, which is kind of like a high wing craft. A buddy on the forum said his dad had one and he remember having to shine out or buff out the shine on the silver. And of course, it was an all silver plane, so he spent many hours buffing that darn thing and he’s like, I’ve got a love hate relationship with this thing, but if you can make plans for one, that’d be awesome. So I’ve got that on the docket. I’ve come up with the plans. I just want to test that the skin comes together. Right. And of course, at that point, it’s a matter of throwing a couple of servos and to see if it’ll fly. Okay. All right, well, I’ve got the old fogey on the workbench right now. That’s right. Tell me about what we did with that. Well, we did a video conference, you and I, as we worked on building it together. We’re trying to get both of them built before this weekend. We come up for T and D, hopefully Sunday or maybe early Saturday morning, we can go out and flying together and have a similar plane. I won’t say identical, because it doesn’t matter. Following the plans, there’s going to be a little bit of a give and take here and there, but I’m looking forward to hopefully getting it up in the air. And I’m looking forward to this one because, like you say, it is kind of, I guess, a trainer plane. It’s going to be an easier fly in the gentler plane, as I understand it, than, say, the Ft Delta was. It probably will give me the satisfaction that I was looking for out of my glider, having my glider flowing correctly. Right. Yeah. I would not mind revisiting a glider in the future. Absolutely. Yeah. I would stick to this plan for now and try to follow some plans for a few builds before I get that wild here. I’m telling you, your plan would have flown beautifully if you had taken the 5 seconds and figured out how to balance it right. You knew how to balance it right and you just chose not to listen because you’re so excited. I wanted to get the dagger thing in the air. Plus, to be fair, there was a lot of hours that went into that place, though. Like, you know what, let’s just get a simpler build going that I can get up in the air and fly around and enjoy and not have to spend 30 hours or whatever I spent building that thing. Not that I would not do it again. Just the time. I’m going to revisit that glider in the future, I will rebuild it and it’ll be better than ever. But I’m also looking I toyed around with the idea. I’ve watched the beginnings of a tutorial series on how to use after our conversation about it. How do you sketch up to model and then flatten down and print out designs for a plane that you build and Google SketchUp? I’m sure there’s a Cessna set of plans out there, but I’d love to try my hand at designing asecisna and printing out the plans building that because the Cessna holds a bit of a special place in my heart because that’s where 90% of my flights and hours were spent. I get you. And it’s a traditional plan that so many people have spent time with in or like you said, simming inn. It’s a beginner’s plane. Like when you learn to pilot a plane, typically you’re going to grab a Cessna, one seven two, or I’m trying to think of the other model, but basically they’re the common go to and they’re that kind of plain because they’re really good flyers, they’re gentle, they’re easy on mistakes, which is really smart for beginning pilots of any kind, whether be RCR or regular. And having actually had my hands on the controls in flown one like they are, they’re nice flyers for the amateur flyer that I was at twelve ish not even getting to put hands on the controls and fly if they flew well. Yeah. All right. And I know I’m kind of cutting this section off, but we’ve been for a while. The reason for the title of the episode. There’s something that was brought up to you via feedback if you were sharing episode one with a friend in that we’re using a lot of lingo that may not be well known for those listening. Those have been around the aircraft or work with them or been in a hobby or want to know most of all or more of the terminology that we’re using. But someone who is not in the hobby has a missile aircraft or been around them or played with them much, is not going to understand a lot of what we’re talking about with some of the words we’re using. That’s how I started. When I started this, I barely knew squat about aircraft. I mean, really, almost nothing. So every time people talk about what’s that, oh, I better look that up, or kind of figure it out. And we’re here to help your journey as new pilots and new RC enthusiasts, right. Our goal is to kind of help you with that journey. So I think what we want to do for the rest of this episode is kind of cover a lot of the basics of the lingo and I hope it’s not going to be boring. Maybe when you were listening earlier, like if there are words that didn’t make any darn sense, pay attention. Here, you’ll probably find a lot of things that you didn’t know and you’ll be able to understand some things. Now, Joe, you’ve got a lot of SIM time and you’ve had some real airplane experience. So I know you’ve got some familiarity with some of the basic airplane terminology, and those are important no matter what kind of thing. Why don’t you go through some of the basic aircraft and airplane terminology for me? Okay. So in no particular order, we kind of made a list of things that we want to go over. It’s not too much time on anyone, unless you ask me a question. To elaborate, you’ve got your canopy, which is sort of your glass windshield, not like your vehicle windshield, kind of goes over the cockpit, protects the pilot from wind and any things that may be up in the air. Your cow, which is I think this is one that you’re aware of. I haven’t really come across this when this goes on the front of the airplane, covering the motor unit. Why don’t you tell me about that? That’s kind of like the bonnet on an old school like Model T Ford. So it basically kind of just is this shell that goes and transitions from the propeller area to the main body of the fuselage, and it goes over the engine. And when you remove it, you are able to get a lot of major engine components. So sort of like the protective shell of the engine. Okay, protect the guts there. Of course, you got your engine, motor, whatever you want to call it, which actually drives your propeller. You’ve got your fuselage, which is your main body of the aircraft. That’s where your pile is going to sit. If you got passenger crafts, your passenger is going to sit in their cargo. Your cargo goes in there. That’s sort of just that long central section that the wings connect to. Flaps are, I guess, typically extendable, but also deflectible surfaces that kind of lock in place to help increase lift on the wings, which allow the plane to fly stable at slower speeds. And aircraft, especially commercial passenger aircraft, use them for takeoff. Lift off, it lets them take off at a lower speed and get up into the air. And then once they’re up in the airspeed increases a bit, then they’ll be able to lift those flaps up, which reduces lift on the wing, but also reduces drag. So the plane is able to get on up to speed. And then when they’re coming in for a landing, of course, you don’t want to land going at regular cruising speed. So they throw all the engines back, extend the flaps. And if you’ve flown in a passenger plane. You’ll feel when those flaps start to go out. You kind of feel yourself bumped forward in the seats a little bit. Slow down a lift in the seat as the plane kind of catches some more. Lifting the wings and all that. Those flaps letting the plane fly at a slower speed so that it’s not coming into the runway so fast. Of course, you got your propeller, which sits on the motor, that’s part of the spins generates the thrust for the plane. And you dig into propellers because you’ve got different angles that a propeller sits at. You’ve got different shapes on the propellers, propellers that have two blades, three blades, four blades and all sort of their own specific role or function for that particular plane. You’ve got your spinner, which is a cone that sits on the front of the propeller. If you look at some of your commercial airliners, you’ll see them when the engines are running slow. I’ve seen them have the spiral paint job on them. So it looks like a little mesmerizing whirly bird in there. I can’t ever look away. And of course, your wings, they’re giving the lift to the plane, giving it flight. You’ve got getting into control services, you’ve actually got your ailerons which sit on the backside of the actual wings. Those are what give you your roll control. And they’re a little counterintuitive at first. But when you want to roll to the right, the hayler on the right wing lifts up the hayler on the left wing, it goes down and the lifting on the right side deflects wind. But also I learned at one point it helps break the lifting factor on that way because it spoils the air. And then on the left side, where it’s angling down is actually increasing lift and deflecting air downwards so it rolls out plane. Of course, the opposite is true in the other direction. Spoilers, which are not on this list. Spoilers I believe are typically mounted on top of the wings. They tend to deploy those when the plane has touched down or is just a few feet off the runway. And it spoils the air flow over the top of the wing, helping to disrupt and disturb the lift that the wings are generating. Right. They are also typically used in gliding. So when you’re gliding and you’ve hit a thermal and you’re going just up, or you’re going too fast and you want to slow down, what they’ll do is they’ll lift the spoilers and those will disrupt the lifting of that wing so it will stop going up. So you can actually not go too far. Okay, you’ve got your elevators which sit on the tail section of the plane on the horizontal stabilizer, which is that horizontal fins that are on the tail of the plane. Your elevators typically deflect together and that’s what gives you your up down pitch on your plane. When they tilt upward, of course, you’re pushing the tail down which pushes the nose up. When you tilt them down, push the tail up, those goes down your rudder. It’s best while you’re doing this to get a little model of an airplane and imagine the back of the airplane stuff tilting down, which when the wind hits, that will kind of push that tail section up, which means it knows anyway, just take a little model and follow along. And then you’ve got your rudder, which sits on the tail section as well, but it’s in on the vertical stabilizer and that controls your yall, which is going to be your flat turning left, right, and the rudder comes into play. On aircraft, when you’re going into your role and you’re turning the rudder is useful for helping to deal with slip, which we talked about earlier, to keep the plane into a controlled, stable turn, solid turn. But certain planes, like gliders, don’t have the tailor on, so they make use of the rudder for turning and rolling right. And they basically couple the rudder and elevator to basically move the tail around to allow kind of a rotation of left or right as kind of like a roll or kind of like a veil around function. But it’s just throwing the back of the plane around to accomplish the same kind of thing. It simplifies the controls. You’ve got your throttle, which sets the speed of the engine, which should correlate to the speed of the aircraft. It’s important to distinguish between ground speed, which we typically think of as speed versus air speed. Your air speed is your speed through the air versus ground speed, which cross the ground. If you’ve got a head breeze sorry, a headwind or a tailwind. If you’re flying into the wind or flying with the wind, then your air speed is going to differ from your ground speed. Are we getting into like high school math again? No, we’re covering that concept. I know. So what you’re saying is if the plane is traveling at 50 miles an hour into a wind coming out at 20 miles an hour, it’s going to be an air speed of 70 miles an hour, which if the plane lifts at 60, that means it’s going to get off the ground. Even though it’s not going fast enough relative to the ground, it will still function. Which is also why when you look at a bird on a slope and it looks like it’s just sitting there motionless, but the relative air speed is high enough for it to fly. Right. It will also be why airports have especially if you’ve looked at an airport runway from a satellite imagery, you’ll see airports have runways running at different angles and they’ll actually call them land and take off from runways either way. So if a runway is pointing north south, they’ll either take off north or south or land north or south. It all depends on which direction your wind’s blowing because they want to get the most wind speed. I know it will be trying to land with the wind. Right. I know. Typically at airfields that fly our sea craft, you’re looking at your final air sock and you’ll just look at what direction the wind is coming from. And that’s the direction you take your aircraft staff at if you can. And that’s the same question. Yes. And in fact I actually did that with the glider. And you could tell because about as soon as that glider got moving across the ground it was up in the air. Yeah. What about an air foil? What does that mean? Yeah, I’m going to read your definition of it. Okay. That we typed in here is the shape of the cross section of the wing. You got many have a Naga designation so I’ll let you cover the NACA designation. But your airflow is essentially the shape of your wing. There’s basically an organization that keeps track of the different shapes of the airflow and they’re designated by different numbers. Each number has a factor on what it is. I don’t entirely know, but basically if you say people say, oh, it’s a 705 six wing, I don’t know. It’s referring to a designation that describes the shape of the wing and that’s the airfoil, the shape of the cross section of the wing and that’s just an airfoil. And depending on the craft you’re flying, you’ll typically want a different airfoil. Most of the ones that our Sears use is a Clark Y and that doesn’t follow naked designation but it’s basically flat bottom curve top, simple to put together and it works. You got your plan form. That is the terminology you threw in. Now you threw in there, but you plan for is essentially a top down view of the aircraft. So I guess it’s what it looks like from a top down perspective. Exactly. Your cord, which is if you pull a line through the airfoil from the wings leading edge to the trailing edge, those lines used to determine AOA. So I assume that’s angle of attack. It is, yes. I’m not super familiar with cord and how it all comes into play. That’s where you start getting technical and you start bringing in your high school map again. Although as far as you need to know with regard to flying an aircraft, just know that there’s a line from the very front of their airfoil which depending on the type may not be the bottom of it. Right. It may actually be a little bit forward and up. That’s going to come all the way back to the tippity thin point in the back. And that angle is going to be important because that’s going to be telling you how this wing is attacking the air, the relative air. So it tells you what angle it’s at and there’s an optimal angle which it functions best at. Okay, so we’re getting into some terminology on the planes. That’s fine, I understand the general concepts of that. You’re going to be able to explain better because angle attack to me is really deals more with pitch than the actual wing itself. So why don’t you take over at that point and then you can convert from there into RC terminology. Sure. The angle is angle of attack is the incident angle of the wing to normal airflow. That’s basically at what angle is it from straight on into the wind, right into the air. So most airfoil have a couple of degrees up tilt from front to back. And when you’re building an aircraft from plans or kids or something, it’s really important to get that number right because that will getting it right will help it fly the best. Okay, so that’s really why it’s there. Just pay attention to that because it can be very important. When you look at aircraft, you’ll notice that the wings aren’t typically just sitting dead level, right? They’re typically at a little bit of an angle and that angle is important for that craft. So just when you’re doing that kind of stuff, if you end up designing on your own no, it’s a thing, it’s important. Pay attention, but ultimately put the plans and you’ll have fun. Camber and under Camber so we’re going to talk about like the Camber and under Cambered wing. It’s basically just like a hollow section. So if you have a curved piece that’s following the upper shape of an airfoil, typical airfoil, which is kind of like a bump in the front and it kind of tapers out to a long flat in the back. Under Canberra would basically have nothing on the underside, so the underside would follow the same shape as the top. Oftentimes the original aircraft, like the Wright brothers and stuff, when they did those kind of aircraft, they just had one single membrane or maybe two, but they all followed the same shape. They just had a handful of cross pieces. So they had an undercamber. Undercamber tends to slow the aircraft down like the old fogey, but it creates really high lift. But you’re never going to get a ton of speed on that. So it’s a thing just kind of understand that the camber or an under Cambered wing, it’s that kind of shape where it’s basically hollowed out bottom or like how much of a bump that shape is that’s? The Camber. Then we’re going to talk about stuff like, hey, this plane has a dihedral, especially if you’re looking at a glider. This has a dihedral or a polyhedral wing. So what a dihedral is basically that each of the wings is kind of up a couple of degrees from true level across the top of the plane, right. They’re usually tilted up a hair that’s so that while you’re flying it will self level and the more dihedral the plane has, the greater the tendency it has to level back out and fly. Even a polyhedral basically means that there’s two levels of that angle so you’ll get a greater amount at the tips and a little less in the middle. A lot of gliders have this. It creates for a stable flight. Which means you don’t have to deflect the control surfaces to keep it going the way you want. Which means you can glide for longer when power and speed is an issue that comes as a big help without digging too deep into the physics and mathematics of it all the dihedral polydihedral that’s operating or working to stabilize the plane because the wings are tilted from each other. Like I say. Not level. But it deflects or alters the actual vector of the lift or the direction of the lift angled inward a bit as opposed to straight up. So think about it this way with each other, right? You have both of them tilted in when you’re flying normal, right? So those are equal. Those should be equal lift. When it tilts to the one side and the one side becomes level, you have all of the lift. All of the lift is actually lifting, whereas the other side isn’t lifting as much because some of that is going inward, right. Some of it is angled in towards the fuselage or towards the center of the plane. Which means it’s not lifting as much as the other wing. Which now means that the wing that’s perfectly. Perfectly level. At least in the upward direction. In the upward direction. The one that’s perfectly level will now produce more lift. Which means it’s going to bring it back towards center where they equal back out. So as it goes back and forth, they’re going to it’s like a teeter totter and eventually it will get it so that it’s equal in the center and that’s usually where the plane is flying level two and straight. That’s how they’re typically designed. But when you kind of have it off kilter, the one side gets more lift. So it kind of corrects. That’s how it’s designed. You can get a lot of math of it, but the truth is it helps keep the plane flying level. Like if I take a plane and I kind of cock it sideways and flying off, I leave the controls off, keep the throttle going and it will slide back down to a level position. I kind of come back and forth a little bit until gets to that balance point. But it will always tend towards that, which is something is very helpful for beginner pilots, for sure. Okay, so now we’re going to head towards and most of these terms are applicable to fullscale aircraft, but they’re also applicable to RC. So when you start scaling down, they still apply, they’re still important. Now I’m going to get into things that are pure RC stuff and then we’re going to follow this up with the general basics of how you put your RC components together. We’re not going to get into all the details of the individual components, but just sort of how it comes together. So with the RC stuff, we’re talking let’s say you need something to power. We’re talking about a battery and that basically powers the motor. It also powers the receiver and the servos. We have a charger, so you got to charge the battery. When you’re done using it, you’re going to deplete all the energy you need to put the energy back. So the charger helps do that safely. There’s electrical terms. A lot of these craft are electrical, right? So we’re using electric motors, we’re using batteries, we’re using speed control. All the stuff has different components that are electrical stuff. So you should know, when we talk about things, know the terms of electrical components, right? You need to know about volts. Volt is basically the electrical pressure, or Oomph, as I like to call it, amps. Amps is basically the current or flow of electricity that goes through the wire. That becomes important when you want to know, can my speed controller handle what’s going to come through it? How much energy does my motor pull through? If your components aren’t rated for how much it’s going to pull through, when it’s trying to get the aircraft to go, you’ll burn something out. So it’s important to pay attention to that. And that’s basically just flow of electricity. Watts is the amount of power that something produces, typically with motors, and essentially it’s a product of volts times amps. That’s all it is. So if you have a certain, like 12 volts running through the motor at 60 amps, you’re going to have a lot of watch, right? You’re going to have a I should have figured out the math before I just said that. I think it’s about so forgive me if I think it’s 60 times. Twelve. That’s 700 watts, right? So you’ll have a 700 watt motor if it’s using 12 volts at 60 amps. So some motors are rated with watts. So that’s important. It’s just a general rating. How much power is used in batteries, you’re going to use the term amp hours or milliamp hours. That’s the capacity in the amount of flow for a duration of time. Right? So a battery can supply a certain amount of flow for certain amount of time. It allows you to look at what your power system is on a craft and figure out how long you’re likely to fly it for. EDFs are known to be amp hungry, so flow hungry, they will suck the juice right out of that battery as fast as you can. They’re using ADF EDF, so we’ll get into that. But it’s an electric ducted fan, so they tend to use, we’re talking 80 or 90 watts, whereas a traditional propeller craft will use 20 or 30 amps, right? So that’s almost twice or three times the amount of flow. So you have the same battery flowing twice as hard out of it, it’s going to fly for half as long. Right. So that’s important to figure it out. So usually when you have a jet flying with an electric ducted fan motor, it’s going to fly for three minutes. But you take that same battery system in a plane that’s using a propeller and a slower pull, it’s going to last for 610 eight minutes. Right. So you can calculate how long your craft is likely to be flying for. But it’s important to understand what milliamps are, and that’s as part of a battery. We talk about lipos when we talk about batteries. What the heck are batteries? They are lithium polymer. So right now, the technology in the battery, it’s one of the biggest energy density and it’s a primary battery. That’s basically the name of the primary battery material component. It’s lithium polymer. And so we typically use that to power most of our electric aircraft. And with that will come a cell count. And it’s basically the number of packets that you pull together to power to basically make up a battery. And each cell gives off three 7 volts per cell. When it’s fully charged, it will be at 4.2 volts. And as you discharge it, the voltage will go to about 35 to 33 volts, 3.3 volts or 3.5 volts, and then that will be empty. The way lithium batteries work, we’ll get into more of that later. Okay. Right. Real quick, I had an analogy that crossed my mind, right. A couple of months ago, we were talking about the volts and the amps because the way you vote is your electrical pressure, the amps being the current or flow. Interesting thing my dad taught me years ago when we were doing some wiring, because I was always worried about the 110 versus 220 volts in the household or the twelve volt coming off a battery. Why could this electrical system hurt you or not hurt you? The thing he explained to me was that volts are not actually what hurt you. Volts gives enough volts, will allow arcs and stuff to happen, but it’s actually the amps that really causes damage. So if you happen to hit that 110 line or that 220 line, if there’s very little amperage going across it, you feel that tangle, you’re going, but you’re not going to get really hurt. But if you got a full power or just a live wire, that’s one thing. You grab that wire, it’s the amps that are really doing the damage to you. Right. That’s where you’re talking about your current versus your pressure there. Sorry. Right, no, that’s okay. And so and I get it like electricity. When I started this, it’s ironic that I work for an electrical utility, but I don’t understand electricity like half the people I work with. But my point is, it’s important to understand what these pieces are and where you need to be concerned. Batteries are really powerful. You need to look up how to use them and store them properly. It’s important because there are a lot of energy packed into almost no space. So if they do get like a short circuit, it’s a purely chemical reaction, so it doesn’t need anything else once it starts to keep going. So you basically can’t do anything but let it run out and just give it smother it essentially, and just leave it. So potentially, if something goes terribly wrong, if it short circuits, it can be really dangerous, but for the most part, they’re relatively safe. We continue to use it today. One could argue gasoline is incredibly dangerous, but in a car it’s handled safely. So again, just be mindful of that kind of thing. What I want to do is now that we kind of talked about some of these electrical terms, we’re going to go back to a lot of the RC components here. These are the big pieces of the electronics. So you have your transmitter. The transmitter is the thing you hold in your hand and it allows the operator to control the aircraft, the receiver. And that transmits, it’s called transmitter because it transmits what you want it to do to the plane. In the plane is a receiver or controller. Typically we’ll call it a receiver. The receiver takes the radio signal from the transmitter and converts that into signals that it sends to various servos and it sends to the speed controller that attaches to the motor to tell how much throttle to get, basically how fast to spin the motor. And it allows you to control the plane. So the transmitter sends information to the receiver, receiver sends it to all the different parts in the plane. It’s like the little brain of the plane and it’s powered by the battery, right? So then we talked about electronic speed controller. Oftentimes it’s abbreviated because that’s really long. It’s abbreviated typically as ESC and it controls, it’s an electronic speed controller. It controls the speed of the electric motor and it typically includes a dec, which I’ll describe in a second. But basically it includes a way to transfer a regulated power to the receiver so it can run safely and continue to receive. So as long as the motor is connected, the receiver will receive signal. Okay? And that’s an important point because we’re talking 4.2 volts on a single cell. Like I’m currently running three cell in the planes that I’m flying. So if I were to hook a three cell lipo straight up to my receiver, assuming I had a connector to do it, which I don’t, but if I could sit there straight up, fry the receiver, right, the components could not handle that voltage. They would basically overload and what we like to call let’s out the magic smoke. So if you see smoke coming out of a component, most likely you fried it and that whatever you were working on isn’t going to work. You’d have to pull that component that busted out and then put in a new one. If you’re new, good luck with that. But if you’re skilled with soldering and you have some knowledge, then I’ve heard of guys who do that. I don’t want to spend that kind of time. I’ll get a new component. Alright, so we talked about having a be. See, in this speed controller, the VEC is a battery eliminator circuit. So basically it kind of cuts out the battery and steps down the voltage to be a controlled steady voltage of 5 volts or six. That usually you can determine if it’s five or six. In most of the electric motors and the electric aircraft, you’ll need 5 volts and it sends the regulated five or 6 volts to the receiver. They typically have a current rating that they’ll send it out at that will send one or two or three amps or something like that. And that’s important to just know that it’s there and pay attention to it. Because the receiver is going to pull a certain amount of energy that their flow is going to require flow of a certain amount. And then each servo is going to pull anywhere between, let’s say a third of an amp to three quarters of an amp, to even 1.2 amps per servo, right? So if you’ve got a plane with four servos, you’re already looking at somewhere around two to two and a half amps, plus you want your receiver. So if this becc can only dish out one amp, what happens is all of those servos start moving and they start trying to draw out two amps of flow through the eliminator circuit and it’s going to cause a brownout, which means then the receiver stops working because it doesn’t have enough OMG going through it to work. So that’s where you want to pay attention to the one amp to three amp and see just what it sends. If you’re working with a wing with a couple of servos and a receiver, the one amp is fine. Most of the small stuff, if you’re looking at five gram servos, very small servos, they typically draw very little amp. But the bigger the servo, the more energy it needs to work. So just pay attention to that. That’s actually important because when I built the Ft delta, which the Ft delta we knew was rated for the speed controller and the speed controller I have, which has PEC built into it, but when I was building the glider, I should have taken into account how many servos and things I had going on and I just straight up didn’t. Most of the when you look at the servo, the systems sold by flight test and if you mimic it with even off brand components and stuff like that, what you’ll find is those components, like if you’re using a 30 amp ESC or 20 amp or something like that, it’s going to be the be. See, the eliminator circuit, the thing that you basically plug in to the receiver from the ESC is going to be rated for what you would typically use on most aircraft, which is about four to five servos. You’re going to have one for each of the control surfaces. You might have something for gear and you might have something for some ancillary piece. Right. And then maybe a little overhead for safety. Right. And so what you’re going to do is you’re definitely going to be able to power the basic three servos or four servos to run all your flight surfaces. The gear, I don’t know, probably and it’s usually not a big issue, their size, so that they should work with the components you’re going to use. But if you’re like me and you’re going to design a relatively small aircraft, but you want it to have retracks, you want it to have full flaps. So each of the flaps has one servo. On each side, you have a Lerons. Each of them have servo. You have elevators, but they’re split. So each one of those has a servo. That’s two more. Oh, and then you want something to move the camera back and forth because you want to put a camera in there. That’s another servo. And then you have nose gear. You want retractable stuff. And then you actually got to power the camera. Right? Yeah. And then the power is yeah, you got to power the camera somehow. Is that going to come from your receiver? Is that going to come from a separate thing? So anyway oh, I want to do Led lights. So now you’re looking at all sorts of stuff. That little two amp rating on your ESC is going to fail miserably, right. So you’re going to pay attention to that. So anyway, we keep talking about these servos, and then let me talk about servers real quick. And then you go ahead and jump in. So on the plane sizes that we typically work with, we’re talking three to four foot planes is the wingspan. They’re going to have about three or four servo. Servers are small, electrically activated devices that push or pull, basically arms. They rotate arms back and forth. And those we use to push control rods, and those go to the control surfaces and move them up and down or in and out or whatever it ends up being. So they’re used in robotics, typically a ton in the planes we work with, they typically are rated by their weight. And that’s like 5 grams is for small aircraft. We’re talking two foot wingspan or so. And then when you’re looking at three to five foot, you’re looking at 9 grams servos. And that’s typically what gets used. You had a question. I’m sorry, Joe. No, you’re fine. It has something to do with service and the ESC, but I lost it. Go ahead. Well, so typically what happens is the ESC provides power to the receiver, and the receiver has almost like a power bus bar so that anything that connects to it can draw power from essentially that ESC connection. So each servo is pulling power essentially through that speed controller connection to the receiver. So the servers are drawing power from the receiver. The receiver draws power from the Becc or the electronic speed controllers becc, and then that draws power directly from the battery. And the speed controller basically is a gateway to tell how much juice to push through to the motor. And then it times it so that the coils activate and the motor spins at a certain speed. So it does a lot of stuff, but we’re not going to get into that. But basically it controls how fast the motor goes. But it’s also a gateway of how much battery juice flows through in every which way, which is why it’s important to pick that’s reliable, because if that goes, likely all the controls will go. So you won’t have throttle and you may not have a Lerons or elevators or rudders, which means now you’re flying a brick in the air anyway, which has happened to people, and I think I’ve been victim of that a couple of times, too. All right, so servos, we’re kind of going as to what’s connected to what, right? So the servos are connected to control rods. So basically these are wires. They can be almost any stiff, thin piece of something. I’ve seen people use bamboo sticks or barbecue skewers or carbon fiber. And then they basically put a little piece of bent wire at the end and those hook into the arms that are on the surface. So each arm has a bunch of little holes. And so if you can get a wire in that and then you’re connected to this control rod. And then if the control is stiff enough, basically when the arm moves back and forth, it translates that movement directly to the control arm on the control surface. So the control surfaces are the alrons elevators, the rudders, the spoilers, or anything else, really. Could be landing gear, that kind of stuff. So the control rods, these extend the moving parts of the aircraft, and the motion of these is controlled by the controlled move, the controlled parts of the airplane, causing it to change its flight passively. So use a control surface to move the plane through the sky. Oftentimes control rods end in a crevice. It’s basically like a small plastic part that connects the plane to the control rod, and it enables the control rod to move the surfaces. It’s really a poor description. It’s basically a little Y shaped thing that clips around your control horn. The control horn is the little it’s almost like a complimentary servo arm that sticks in the surface. You want to move on your plane, right? And then the club is kind of clips around it and clips in through the holes. And then usually there’s like a little rubber band or a little piece of tubing that kind of cinches it down and keeps it stuck in those holes. But you can look up clevis on Google and see a bunch of examples with Cleveland be the little metal I got the little metal piece that got screw threads on one and push through the control horn. Tighten the nut down. And it’s got a hole in it that I stick my control rod through. And then it’s got another screw that goes and it kind of binds up against control rod. Is that technically a clevis or not? Something that’s performing a similar function? It’s something that’s performing a similar function. I’m pretty certain. No. Maybe it might be, because the thing I’m thinking of is a Y clevis. And literally it looks like if you take a Y, the bottom of your Y is what screws into the end of the control rod. And the upper piece of the Y, the two end pieces of the Y basically clip around your control horn. And there’s typically a rod or a piece that sticks into one of the holes in that control horn. Okay, so would you have axe as a cliffs? Effectively, if it’s not one? Let’s see. Control route is basically the last piece that connects to the control surface that allows the plane to move through the air. We’ll talk about glide ratios. So when you look at planes to see how effective they are at flying through the air, you’re basically looking at a glide ratio. You want to see in 1ft of drop, how far forward will the plane go. So when you’re looking at gliders, their glide ratios are like 60 to one. So they will travel 60ft forward before they drop in 1ft of drop. Whereas like park flyers and stuff, they’ll travel maybe 7ft as they drop 1ft. Okay, let’s see. We talked about we’re going to talk about a couple of things here, which are basically mixes that will oftentimes use and they’re used in certain types of craft, like flying wings. Elevants elevation is basically mixing of the aerons to act as both an aeron and an elevator control. They’re typically like if you think of a Delta craft, delta is basically like a triangular shaped jet. Let’s say it has two surfaces at the back of those jets. So if both of them go up at the same time, they act as elevators up or down. If they go at the same time, they act as elevators. If they go opposite each other, one up and one down, they’ll start rolling the craft and acting as an Aylon. And what an elevator does allows you to mix the individual sticks you’re using. One stick is for elevator and one stick is for a Leon. But as you move that stick around, it will translate that movement on your transmitter to corresponding movements in your Aylon control surfaces to act as both those effects together. So it’s a mixing, it’s electronic mixing within your radio to send it to your craft to do what you’re thinking of in your head, if that makes sense, which is whether it was episode zero or episode one. When we were talking about the Ft delta and I was talking about the transit. Are being set up to handle that. I think at that time I was trying to call them like AIL raiders or something, but we settled on Flapper on, which was not correct. Which is not entirely correct. Why don’t you tell me what flappers what did you learn flaperons were? No, I’m still going to let you have that one, basically. But going back to we had incorrectly call them flapper ons the elephants was after, like you said, your transmitters controlling the mix on. That exactly right. I was kind of retconning episode zero, episode one where we talked about it. No, that’s important because if you’ve listened to those episodes and you kind of like, oh, they got that all wrong, you’re like, well, you’re right. We did. It happens. We’re nobs, it will happen. So Flat Runs flaperons is the other mix that I think we mix messed up. So oftentimes you’ll want flaps on your plane to slow it down and increase the lift. That way you can have a real slow touch and go kind of situation. Or maybe your plane goes fast and you need to slow it down and give it extra lift as it’s landing or taking off. But you don’t want to cut extra control surfaces. So what you’ll do is you’ll use your Ailerons because usually when you’re taking off Atlanta, you really don’t need to roll the craft. You shouldn’t if everything is going okay, you shouldn’t be rolling the craft. It’s sure to be pretty level and you’re really just kind of bringing it to the ground. So it’s a control mix that allows the mixing of Ailerons to act as both Ailerons, controlling the roll of the craft and flaps, which basically slow and increase lift. So that allows you to maybe keep both flaps generally down, creating additional lift sorry, both Ailerons down, creating extra lift like flaps and slowing the plane down. But if you need to roll just a little bit, it’ll bring one of them up or up or down, usually just up a little bit. And it allows to create a small rolling action. So you still can function with roll, but you still have the choice of having flaps without having to actually cut out separate flaps, adding separate servos, draining more current from your B EC. They may not be able to handle it. So it’s a way to kind of get that function without having to tax your system more. And then, of course, when you start like you may not be starting like us building like maniacs, what you might want to do is you might want to go to your street for yourself. I know, right? Well, I hope you do. Honestly, I hope whoever tries starts this gives at least scratch building a try. Look at flights because you might find that that’s way more enjoyable than you thought it was going to be. Maybe you also don’t have time. So when you’re looking online or going to your local hobby store, you’ll find that they’ll have things called ARFs and RTFs. So Arfarf, what that stands for is almost ready to fly. It basically says, we built the craft for you. And all the components are pretty much in it as far as like the Ailerons, the control rods and all the different little pieces. But you’re still going to need to supply the big, heavy, expensive components like the motor, because most people have very specific things they either need or want for the motor. Like they go, well, your craft is cool, but I want to do it my way. So they’ll buy an ARF and that will have that will be usually typically missing in the motor. It will be missing the speed controller. It definitely won’t have the batteries. Batteries almost are never included and sometimes will be called receive. Another type is called receiver ready. And it’s basically everything is in there except a receiver for your individual transmitter, because everybody’s got a different transmitter, typically. So depending on who you are, you’re just something different. But you can take your receiver that you know you have that works with your transmitter, put it in this receiver readycraft or RRF, and then you’ll be able to plug that in and off you go. Sometimes they call it a plug and fly. There’s a couple of different terms depending on what site you’re at real quick. I guess that’s an important distinction to make real quick when you’re looking at your receivers and your transmitters, that not all receivers are going to communicate with all transmitters. Sorry, not all receivers aren’t received from all transmitters. So as you’re looking at that stuff, it’s important to make sure that I got my turnedeedx, which has a couple of receivers that I got in the box. And I have tested them all, they all work. But if I wanted to get more receivers, I have to make sure that they’re going to communicate or listen into the protocols that my turn is using. Exactly right. And that’s an important thing. I know when we hit our transmitter Section episode, we’ll try to go into that as deep as we possibly can. I’ve only been doing this for about two to three years, although I’ve learned a lot since then. I don’t know all the weeds. Hopefully we’ll be able to get a guest who can get into some of the weeds with us. But my point being, though, that you’re right, every transmitter has a different way to do it, to differentiate themselves from everybody else, right? And some of them are I don’t know what better they’re just done differently. It’s really cool. There’s a YouTuber who and of course, now that I’m trying to figure it out, I’ll blank. But basically, Bruce, he’s a New Zealander or Aucklander who flies RC and he’s been doing it forever and he has this episode where he talks about each protocol, has a different way to tackle. How do we not step on each other’s toes and have multiple people holding the same transmitter? How does it talk to just your craft and not listen to all the other crafts that are out there sending the signals? Right? Like, how does it make sure it’s only listening to your transmitter? It’s a really cool thing that’s a whole ball of wax we won’t get into. Because when you’re sitting there, I thought I was playing Mario. Exactly right. It’s true. No, I’m with you. That was my day too, man. So my point is, you’re right. When you look at your receivers, if you’re looking to buy new ones, pay attention that it works with your transmitter specifically. If not, ask the question, does this work with this thing that I’ve got? And they might point you to somewhere where they’ve already answered the question. That might be rude, whatever. Just get the answer to the question because you don’t want to waste your money on that, wasted on other more fun things. So ready to fly, or RTF is oftentimes the term they use. Sometimes that’s receiver ready effectively, but oftentimes ready to fly means everything is in the box. Like everything, you have a plane, you have the batteries, you have the battery charger, you’ll have a transmitter. The receiver will already be part of the craft. Everything will be hooked up. It’s already been tested. It’s already ready to go. The only thing you need to do is turn it on and bind the two together. So basically, make sure that the transmitter says, I’m talking like this, and the other guy says, do you understand my language? And your receiver says, yeah, I understand your language. Cool. All right. We’re the only two going to speak this language from here on out. And I hear you and you hear me. That’s it. And so basically, that’s all it is. It has everything in the box. You buy the box, you go home, you charge your battery, and off you go. And then, of course, you might look at something and say, oh, it’s this kit. And what that might mean kit might mean a lot of different things, but usually it means it’s a fully unassembled craft. It’s got all the pieces, so it has all the, like a balls of it will have all the individual pieces to physically put together the craft. But you’re definitely going to need to supply and it may even have, like, landing gear, and it may have a Lerons in the box, or sorry, it may have Servos in the box that go with this thing. It may have a windshield. It may have some parts, but typically it’s going to have just the core pieces you need to build this craft to put it together. And you’re going to have to supply all the electronics. You’re going to have to choose what servos you want. You’re going to have to put in your own receiver and your own battery and all that stuff. So you need all those things. So kit, which is a little different than some of the cause, I think flight test sell some was classified as kits. But you buy like the kids that come with everything, right? You could unless no, I think most of the Balticism that I’ve ever seen there are literally balsa kits. They come with a planet and they come out with diecast or laser cut balsa sheets. And there’s like an instructional booklet that tells you what pieces, what and how they get assembled and that’s it. There’s no glue, there’s no component suggestion. They might indicate what kind of motor size roughly you’re looking for, what kind of prop size propeller you need. But it’s pretty bare bones and it’s for the guy who loves putting these things together from scratch. And it’s typically not going to come up with come with any coding system. It’s pretty bare bones, but they are a lot of fun. And honestly, it’s how the whole hobby started. Most of the people who started doing this, we’re building gliders back in the 50s or 40s or whatever. And they would get a piece of wood, a piece of balsa wood and they would like look at what people did on plans or ask them to print a set for them. A xeroxit wait, xerox. It wasn’t even a thing. Anyway, they print out a set for them and they would get this set and then they would draw them out on the balsa and then they would build the plane individual pieces that they cut up themselves out of a single sheet. So anyway, so look out for the kits. The kits are fun, but a kit does not mean that it’s most of the way together, typically. So we talked about all the different pieces of the airplane. We have a couple diagrams that will probably post in the show notes. They come from various find out if we can post those images. We got to find some other sources. I think as long as we keep where we pull the source from and I included that with all the links to the different websites we pulled them from like Ailrons Provide, Role. What is role? It basically it’s a rotational about the access that goes from nose to tail. You have the elevator is a rotation about the axis that goes along the wings. And then you have the yaw, which is basically the vertical axis. And it rotates it around the vertical axis. So it’s basically like you’re in a car and you turn left, you’re yawing. Effectively. That’s one that always kind of got me. So basically what you have is you have and I’ve covered it, but I want to kind of pull it together. You have your battery connects to the ESC, that gives power to the ESC, which the speed controller then pushes to the battery. If it’s a brushless motor. It’ll bring it out in three different phases. If it’s brushed it’ll be two wires, basically an in and out and that will turn the motor. The speed controller tells how much juice to go and when and then that will move the motor. The motor has the prop the proposals through the air creating thrust and it basically pulls the plane through the air unless you have it configured as a pusher but anyway but the ESC typically has a battery eliminator circuit or basically a voltage controller which then it basically has a signal wire and it provides power to the receiver. The signal wire basically helps the receiver talked to the speed controller to tell it how much juice to throw to the motor and then it takes the power that it got from the ESC that it’s been given from the battery and then it powers all of the different channels in the receiver and channels basically referring to something basically one servo channel. Basically it’s a thing that sends information to a servo and a servo basically moves exactly like you tell it to from the transmitter. Transmitter sends a signal to the receiver. Receiver says oh on channel six, go to 45 degrees and it sends that signal down to the servo. The servo grab the power from the receivers and then it moves to the appropriate position which then moves your control surfaces and then it moves your plane through the air. It seems kind of complex. There’s a couple of diagrams. Again we’ll see if we can post those in the show notes. They’re very helpful but you can look on YouTube and say like hey, how does an RC plane work? Or something like that and you’ll find some things. Lastly, we kind of talk about channels, right? Oh, I’m going to fly. It’s a three channel plane. It’s a four channel plane. What if it’s a three channel wing? What does that mean? Right. So we have a simple diagram. I believe this one was from Flight Test and you have a three channel plane. Basically each of the pin sets from the receiver is one channel and so you have one of the channels goes to an elevator. One channel goes to direct what the rudder is doing and the last channel is the thrust or basically goes to the motor and that controls how fast the plane goes through the air like thrust. So another kind of three channel plane is one that has elevator and ailerons. In the first one you were basically sliding the plane left and right and using elevator and rudder to control how the back of the plane goes whereas three channel is basically pitches the plane up and down with an elevator and alarm allows it to roll and then thrust controls how fast it goes through the air. Ford channel allows you to combine all of that stuff. So you have a rudder, elevator and ailorand that’s what most full scale aircraft have, they are running with all of those things, typically even more. Right. But that’s pretty advanced. Right. Because if you wanted to run a, say, four channel plane, four plus channel plane, where you got your Alarrons on a channel, your elevator channel, your runner on channel, your thrust on channel, but then you want to add in flaps. Now you got a fifth channel or something that controls the nose gear or the gear. Right. So flaps and gear. Now you’re into a 6th channel and so you got to make sure that your receivers have enough channels for what you’re trying to do. Mostly I would say that almost every basic transmitter receiver set has six channels. That’s not entirely the case, but with six channels you’ll be able to do almost anything you want. With most aircraft you can either buy commercially or build yourself. Honestly, I have rarely needed any more than six channels. And if I did need more, I got very creative on how I used the channels I had like if I’ve got an Ailer on left and an Alarron right, and I would just put them together, I’d harness them together to be only one control and just move the make sure that they’re opposite and how they operated. So that way when it’s in a forward control, they’d move opposite and then it’s just only one channel controlling that instead of two. And that’s actually what I ended up doing with the glider, was I had the Ailerons on the same channel, but the orientation or the side of the servo, I had the arm sticking out of the controls reversed so that I only had one signal and send signal down one channel. But it controlled those surfaces. It still works if you’re trying to trim out. Actually, you still trim your role when you’re splitting a single channel’s signal between two servos. What does trimming do? You know, Joe? Yeah, that would have been a good one. I forgot that we didn’t talk about that. Yeah. No, this could be one of those things. As we move forward, we come across a term we’re just going to be mindful that if we say a term that we hadn’t really covered before right, we do it. So trim is I don’t know that I have a textbook definition, but trim is basically where you’re putting the zero point of the control. So if you’re flying along and let’s just put ourselves in the cockpit. It’s the best way I’ll be able to describe. If you put yourself in the cockpit, you’re flying along and the plane is wanting to roll constantly to the right, or in the case of your vehicle, you’re going down the road and the car wants to go to the right. You’re kind of having to hold the control, the steering wheel to the left just to counteract that, to keep yourself going straight. We don’t really trim out vehicles that’s handled by front end alignment. But with the aircraft you can trim, which will basically cause a deflection between the control surfaces to counteract that. So if your planes want to roll to the right, even when your sticks in the zero position or the center position, so you’re telling to go to B level, but it’s wanting to roll to the right, you trim it to the left and that causes the control surfaces to deflect to counteract that. And you don’t want to have to do a ton of trim if you got to do a ton of trim. Yes, I’m out of alignment. But every plane you’re going to want to trim out a little bit in the case of pitch with your elevators. Or you can trim out. You can trim out your elevators such that you get it at a comfortable cruising speed. You trim it so that the plane remains flying stay. Of course you can do the same thing with your rudder trim while in RC world. We can kind of just fight the stick or deal with it with your commercial airplanes. They definitely trim it out. And I think Josh Bixler, one of his YouTube videos was talking about his dad or somebody, he was always fascinating. You can trim the plane in perfectly calm still air where you’re not catching any drafts or any turbulence. You can actually trim a plane out. So you set the controller down and it just flies in a big circle. Yeah, exactly. If you got your throttle set steady, you get your trim set up so that it’s flying. It’s not nose up, nose down, it’s flying level front to back. And then you can give it a touch of roll trim. You’ll just sit there and fly big old circles, which if you’re going to trim yourself into a very slight roll, you then have to trim your pitch up a bit because once you start going into a roll, your nose will slip and drop on you, which all kinds of fun stuff. But trimming is basically you use trim to make flight easier on yourself so that you’re not fighting the controls or having to continuously hold input on something to keep it stable. And then it’ll fly a lot smoother as you’re going around because you’re not having to fight the controls. Like you said, you’ll be at the zero point when you let go, not trying to fight for it. I think we talked about this kind of plane with the Delta in the episode one, but basically that is a flying wing setup. So you think of a B two bomber, that kind of deal and then that is basically also three channel plane. And you have two different servers, each one controlling one of the control surfaces along the back of the wing. And then you control them as elibons, which act as both elevators. If they work together, if they work opposite, they become a lerons. And then of course, you have the propeller as a thrust component. Those are the three channels. And as long as you have the mixer, you’re not going to have to figure out what stick is. What you just say, I want to go up and you move the elevator controls on your transmitter like you would any other plane, and it will move the servos correctly to do what you want. Right. So that’s another channel as you set up your planes on the ground just to make sure that when you move the sticks the way you want, it’s actually moving the appropriate surfaces correctly on your plane. That’s where you check your channels and make sure they’re doing right. I think we talked last time, it’s something that Flight Test used, and I think it’s clever enough to remember it’s the high five method that basically whatever direction you move to stick to aylorn or elevator, that surface should come up to meet the direction that stick is and kind of high five it. And I’m using air quotes high five it so that way you know you’re not going to get them reversed and reversed control surfaces. And as a beginner is a death throw right there. And if you want to see more, if you want to learn more about this stuff, there’s a lot of people have a beginner series or teach you what’s what on RC aircraft. They probably do a lot quicker than we did, but you definitely enjoy it. Flight Test has a beginner series on how to choose a plane. We’re going to have a link in the show notes and then another beginner series on how they work, what are our sea planes, how do they work, how to get into them, where to go, that kind of stuff. So after that, I think we’ll just kind of talk about what I think that sums up most of the things we’re going to talk about in the vernacular or vocabulary we’re going to use pertaining to this stuff. So if you need to and you go, what the heck does all that mean? Come back and watch. Listen to this episode again. And if all of us fails, Google is a very good source. I don’t really want us to give off the idea that we’re just offloading research responsibilities. We say something that you don’t understand, that it’s your responsibility to go look it up. It’s things that we may not always think about because it’s common terminology to us. And that’s it. Matt’s going to throw some words at me sometimes and I’m going to hey, what’s that? Somebody’s listening. Well, of course it’s this. How does he not know that? It’s all part of learning process. Hopefully everybody listening. Got to learn a little something out of this, be they first timers or just getting into the hobby or I’m not sure that we could teach somebody that’s been doing this for many years something but we threw a different perspective on something at them. Okay, well, at this point, I think, well, we don’t have everything solidified. We’re hoping that next episode is going to be something along the lines of where you can get your next your components. So where do you go to go shopping if you’re like. Hey, that sounds great. Where do I go to find this stuff? So that will hopefully be what we cover some of next episode, and then I think I’d like to close out. I typically like to close out with what are we looking to work on before our next episode? What do you think, joe, what do you got? Well, I’ve got to finish building the Sogy out and get it wired up and electronic out. I apologize for that. It’s getting late at night. Okay. I apologize for the listeners. I was a couple too many dudes on that. I would get fully built. This weekend, we come up for some dragons. We can hopefully get out there and fly. If the weather is going to be calling for us, I hope it cooperates with us. I hope so, too. I really hope so. Otherwise, we’re probably going to do something dumb and crash our planes a second. We get out. This is it. But you throw it. I’m just going to throttle up, baby. We’re in a parking lot. Drive straight and chuck it out the window. I’ll hold on to it on the top of the car. You drive, and then I’ll let go. Yeah. Hopefully we won’t do that kind of crap. Oh, man. I’ll drive down the field anyway. Yeah. No, we can tell it’s getting late at night because we’re okay. Yeah. Looking at what I’m going to be building, I forgot that I’m going to be finishing up my Spruce gosling. It’s basically the Spruce Goose is, I think, one of the still one of the largest planes ever built, period. I think it’s only been taken over by SpaceX’s giant double fuselage, massive glider, shuttle launcher thing. And so I’m building a six foot, a really tiny six foot model of it using a bunch of three inch, 14 eight motors. I built the plane. It looks great, and I’ve just been afraid to connect all the motors. That’s eight motors. If you haven’t been paying attention, that means that’s two quadcopters worth of motors stuck in this plan. Yeah, I just googled the Spruce Goose. Dang. Yeah. At the end of The Aviator, if you haven’t seen the movie The Aviator, it’s a long one, but it’s a good one. It’s all about the creator of the Spruce Goose at the end of the movie, it’s him basically finishing up and getting that craft in the air, and it is literally over a football field. In wingspan 328ft, I think, or 334 or something. I’m making it a six footer. So it’s tiny and it’s a watercraft, because, I mean, where else are you going to find enough runway to get something that giant into the air, right? Yeah, no kidding, right? So let’s see. I’m going to be working on my old fogey as well. When we did our build, I got mine most of the way there. So I’m going to put some fanciness to it and see if I can get that finished up. So I’m certain I’ll have that done in no time. I have landing gear to put on my Lincoln Sport. That as a friend’s biplane that her uncle who flew with I should just shot a pardon me, should have pulled up information up. Basically her uncle flew with Churchill or Churchill’s brother or something like that. It’s somebody really famous in aviation. I’m blanking on it right now. Anyway, I got to put landing gear on that and make a maiden flight, that’s for sure. I’m finishing up the Saboy Marquette S 55 X, used in many of the Italian generals Balboa’s strategic missions. So that’s almost done. I’ve got all those machines we talked about and then basically see if I can get them in the air. And then sky terror. I’m building the sky tear. I’ve got the plane built. I’ve got to attach the motors and start putting some controllable thrust tubes on it. So I should be able to start focusing on that again. That’s in the agenda after some of those other planes. So maybe I’ll get it done before we next talk. Maybe not. And then last but not least, as we close all this stuff out, all these projects, I’ve put online on the flight test forums, a community challenge out there called Build Brewery because I find the month of February as the most ridiculous sounding month name you could come up with. I don’t know why anyway, so Build Brewery just as equally foolish, but there’s a number of challenges and forum flurry that has been going on over the last four or five months and it comes to a close on the end of January. So I challenge anybody who wants to join me there’s. One month in February is literally exactly four weeks. You have four weeks to build four planes. It’s kind of to highlight some of these new planes that may have come out as well as how quick and easy the flight test style of building is. So really we were sitting down for about 3 hours and you were cutting the stuff out too. You had most of the old fogey put together. By the time we finished our time, I had a fuselage cut out and put together. The wing is literally just score a line and glue it, I’m pretty sure. So the wing isn’t a lot. A lot of my time went to cutting out the temperature it is. And by the time he was done with that because I cut mine out a lot faster, I’ve been doing it for a long time. So by the time. He was done. I had almost my entire plane put together, so in 3 hours or one night, you can put together most of Flight Test designs. So it’s kind of to highlight how simple and easy they are. And then of course, some of us are idiots and I’m raising my hand and are going to tackle far more challenging planes. So we’ll see how that goes. But anyway, I urge anybody who’s listening to give that a shot if they haven’t or at least look into it because it’s a do the challenge on your own. It’s a lot of fun. Well, Matthew, thank you for inadvertently, well, maybe intentionally give me a deadline. No. When I got to get these episodes edited. Because if you’re putting the call out like this got to be up before February. As of time of this recording, episode zero has not been edited. And there’s a little more dude, episode one. So I guess it’s time to get my button gear. I’m sorry, Joe, I wasn’t trying to do it that way. It’s fine. But if you’re going to put a call out, it doesn’t do any good to post this in March. Well, that’s okay, we can always cut that part out. No, it’s fine. Episode zero is interesting. This will be easy enough. We’ve been going for a while, there’s a lot of information, so why don’t we go ahead and call it here and we’ll catch up with everybody next time. Matt closing. Yes, absolutely. I’d like to thank everybody for joining us today. I’m Matt Allen, otherwise known as Foamy DM on the flight test forums as well as RC groups. And this is my co host, Joe Webb. I have yet to get him stuck on one of these forms, but I promise you when he does, we’ll let you know what he’s known as. In the meantime, go out and build something. Have a lot of fun and tell us about it. You can reach me at fomidm@gmail.com. And we appreciate you listening to us and we look forward to talking to you next week, or not next week, next, whenever. Alright, bye.

The Aviation RC Noob Podcast

Helping You in Your RC Aviation Journey

Ep 2 – What’s What (Understanding all of the Hobby Lingo)

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