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F/FSport W


by david mitchell You can reach David Mitchellat 230 Walnut St. NW, Washington, District of Columbia 20012, or via e-mail at davedge@me.com


e had a great turnout at the FAC Non-Nats in July, with about 100 registered contestants. The weather, though splendid at times, was mostly hot, humid, and windy, with a little rain thrown in for good measure. Not really ideal, but F/F ain’t for sissies in the first place, so who’s complaining? Tom Nallen II will be providing a thor- ough write-up in a future issue of FM, so I’m not going to go into a bunch of detail in this column. What I did want to do is thank everyone who participated, and especially to thank those of you who chipped in time and talent to help run the meet. Every year seems to bring a new twist, but from an ad- ministrative standpoint at least this was one of the smoothest flights I have had yet as CD.


Special thanks go to Stew Meyers and his trusty sidekick Rick Pendzick, who once again worked their magic on the technical side of things; all the scale judges, compli- ance officials and runners, who scrutinized, squinted, conferred and conveyed ’til there was no more to be done; Diane Courtney, who knows where all the leaks are and how to plug them; Rich Weber, my co-CD, who was an oasis of calm; Bubba Mayo, who keeps registration from going haywire; Ross Mayo, who handles all sorts of things I don’t even want to think about; Vance Gilbert, who did a great job on the award certificates; all the vendors and individuals who con- tributed kits and hardware for the raffle and contest prizes; and Mike and Karen Es- calante, who were there to help sort the time slips when I needed them most. Salute!


PHOTOGRAPHY: DAVID MITCHELL


The new 12-inch Easy Built prop, shown next to an 11-inch Peck prop for comparison. Note the substantially beefed-up hub. The hub on the new Easy Built 10-inch prop is identical.


Giving you your props Dave Niedzielski, of Easy Built Models


(www.easybuiltmodels.com), has begun dis- tributing something that a lot of us have been looking for: a high quality plastic prop, pitched a bit higher than the ubiquitous gray Peck props, in 10- and 12-inch diame- ters. These are beauties, molded in a tough, flexible white plastic, robust where they need to be (at the hub) and thin where they don’t, nicely balanced, and engineered with some subtle touches that I think people will appreciate. The main shaft bore is stepped: the rear of the hub is 1⁄16-inch I.D., while the bore at the front of the hub is 3⁄32-inch I.D. There is a


substantial freewheel ramp molded in. The 1⁄16-inch shaft bore allows for a beefy .062 prop shaft without having to ream out the bore; it also accommodates a 1⁄16-inch O.D. brass bushing.


Close up of the Easy Built prop hub, showing the stepped bore and the ramp. If used, the ramp should be modified by trimming to the red dotted line so that the bent prop shaft will seat squarely to it.


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Why is this so great? Wait...did you know that you can get special thin-walled (.006) brass tubing that is 1⁄16-inch O.D. and .050 I.D.? Easy Built and Shorty’s Basement (www.volareproducts.com) both stock K&S “Special Shapes” #15037 brass tube. Get some. You can use it to bush your new Easy Built prop and thus fit it to a .047 wire prop shaft, which is robust enough for most appli- cations, and a whole lot easier to bend into shape than .062. Try it, you’ll like it. But let’s say you want to use .062 wire, es- pecially with that big 12-inch job, and you want to keep things simple: you like an old- school shaft with a 90-degree bend at the front end, that engages the molded-in ramp on the prop. Here’s where that larger 3⁄32- inch bore at the front of the hub comes in. When you make a 90-degree bend in the prop shaft, there will be slight radius left on


the inside of the bend. With a constant- diameter bore hub, that radius would bind in the hub and gum up the freewheel. Sure, you could take a file to the inside of the bend and square out the radius, but the larger bore makes it a non-issue. Sweet! The larger front bore is also useful if instead you are holding your prop on by other means, like a piece of wire insulation on the front of the shaft. You can cut the prop shaft flush to the front of the hub, and then recess the re- tainer into the larger bore at the front of the hub. Neat! Note that the molded ramp should be re-cut to engage squarely with the 90-degree bend in the shaft wire. How do they perform? Well, I’m not very scientific about these things; it’s all trial and error for me. I put one of the10-inch props on my 29-inch Rockytop Models Miles Magister (www.rockytopmodels.com), and also one on my own-design 30-inch Caproni CA.183. I had been flying both of these models with 91⁄4-inch Peck props on two loops of 3⁄16-inch Tan Super Sport rubber. Both had been a bit “zoomier” than I preferred; I wanted to slow them down a bit, and get a longer motor run. I could try a custom stripped motor, but I like to keep that sort of picky stuff to a min- imum. A motor of all one size of commercial- ly available strip makes me a happier per- son. Bending more pitch into the Pecks helped, but I thought the 10-inch EB might do the trick, and yeah...the pairing is a pret- ty ideal match, in my book. The 10-inch props absorb the power of two loops of 3⁄16- inch rubber very nicely. Run time is longer. Climb out is a little less dramatic, but the flight profile is more controlled overall. Give ’em a try—I think you’ll like the options they’ll give you, and I’m sure Dave N. would like to get feedback.


OCTOBER 2013


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