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FanFacts H


ello again! To borrow from a Snoopy cartoon, as he sits on his dog house (yes, I have seen it fly!), while typing away at his “Great American Novel”: It was a dark and stormy night, with the weather not fit for man nor beast…. Well, as I look out the window in early April it is snowing horizontally with 30–50 mile per hour winds. When will Spring finally get here? I want to go fly! I think a good place to start this month is where I finished last time, with Kevin Cox’s F-32. Kevin has flown it again, and is playing around with slight thrust vectoring given the way the airplane changes pitch with throttle. The internet community seems to think that it is a thrust-line vs. wing center of lift issue, and while still an evolving design, kudos to Kevin for undertaking such a different airplane! Last August I mentioned that EADS (the parent company of Airbus) had begun work- ing on a man-carrying twin-EDF called the E-Fan. I can now report, as of last month, that it has flown. A short video of the maiden can be found online at YouTube at: http://tinyurl.com/llnrdxp. Additionally, some details have been published about its power source. Kokam is a name most of us recognize, and they are providing the 19.2 kWh of batteries. With however many individual batteries it will carry, the two- seater is reported to be able to cruise for 45–60 minutes, or perform aerobatics for 30-minute flights. It will be interesting to see the continuing evolution of this project, especially the charging times and any bat- tery-related issues that may arise. Recently, I received a series of photos from Mike Warren showing the mods he is doing on his venerable 1⁄6.3 scale Airworld Me-262 (available from Vogelsang Aeroscale www.vogelsangaeroscale.com in Chapel Hill, NC). He has had this kit for some time and life is now allowing him the time to do it “his way.” This kit is arguably the most scale version around, but suffered from the “old- school” big mouth bass/trumpet bell shaped intakes dating to the brushed motor with NiCd battery days.


by greg moore You can reach Greg Moore via e-mail at jetflyr@comcast.net


PHOTO: MIKE WARREN


Planning to use a pair of Schübeler 90mm fans in his 79-inch span Airworld Me-262, Mike Warren re-worked the intake portion of the nacelles to a much more scale-like shape. The opening is now 80mm in diameter yet still provides 100 percent FSA for the fan units without looking like a trumpet bell or largemouth bass.


Ivan Munninghoff had one about 12 years


ago that had to have the nose reinforced and a metal frame to act as a heat sink for the 60 NiCd batteries. The 30 cells per motor with a measly 2000mAh capacity gave just a three- to four-minute flight. Today’s much higher efficiency setups allow more scale in- takes, so Mike re-worked the nacelles to an 80mm diameter opening. This just happens to be 100 percent of the FSA on the Schübel- er fans he will power it with.


Since he was modifying the nacelles any- way, the next step was to fabricate the starter bullet. A piece of blue foam glued to a stick, chucked into a drill and sanded to shape produced a very usable plug. And since he did not want to try and fabricate two identical pieces, he stretched a party balloon across the plug, applied glass and epoxy and finished with a second balloon stretched over the entire thing to produce a smooth surface. When cured, he repeated the process for the second bullet, and you can see in the ac- companying photo how thin the bullet can be. When attached to the nacelles, the bul-


lets look at home and much more scale than the flared/trumpet bell intakes on my 70mm fan, Dynam Me-262 version ever will. Over the winter, Rick Paquin (whose HET SuperSniper XL 90 has been shown in these pages) decided to purchase a SkyEmaster F-15, which is an EDF F-15 produced by Skymaster Jets www.skymasterjet.com. At 69 inches long with a wingspan of 44 inches, this seems to be about the same size as the widely popular TopGun F-15 from the mid 1990s which flew phenomenally well. Rick is powering his with a 120mm Taiwan Tornado fan unit which is all aluminum. He is using a HET motor and speed control. The fan unit does produce a nice sound during the taxi tests he has done and we shall see when we get the weather to fly it! Rick is powering it with a 12S 5300mAh GensAce setup, so pow- er should be more than adequate. The fit and finish of his airplane is nice, and the paint job was well done. More on this one when we get flying weather!


No stranger to these pages, the 25-per- cent scale T-38s of Andy Zaner and Brent Hecht continue to gather internet postings


PHOTOS: MIKE WARREN


A scale nacelle needs a scale starter bullet for the Junkers Jumo engine, so Mike spun a plug out of blue foam, and molded his own as described in the text. Such hard thinking and easy work made his helper (at left) contemplate if it was edible while it set up in the warmth of the sun. The translucency (above center) of the finished bullet (on the left) gives a hint as to its lightness while the plug shows how smooth blue foam can be sanded. The finished starter bullets (above right) are secured to the nacelles with approximately 1⁄32 inch thick G-10 fiberglass sheet in an “X” pattern that is very close to scale. The finished effect is far more scale in appearance than before.


22 MAY 2014


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