RC Modeling

The day after Christmas dawned clear, bright, cold and dead calm in Southern California - perfect conditions for flying RC models. So it was opportune that my fellow PSF club member, Arnold Coggshall, had invited me to join him for a morning of "flying with the big boys" at the Valley Flyers site in the Sepulveda Basin. He brought his beautiful nitro Spitfire and gas Edge 540 to add to an impressive array of models of all types and sizes. Much to our surprise, we discovered our own Jerry Lake there, as well. I hope you enjoy the photos in the gallery!

I've been fiddling around with microcontrollers for years and have built a number of useful projects based upon them. So, since I recently returned to radio-controlled modeling, it seemed only natural that I'd eventually dream up a project to bring these two interests together. That project is a data logger to record electric power during flight. Now, commercial data loggers are readily available for this purpose, but what's the fun in just buying one when I can design and build my own?

About a year and a half ago, my brother gave me a 3D profile electric plane for my birthday. Made by Hyperion for extreme 3D aerobatics, it was a lot of fun and got me back into RC modeling after many years away. However, after subsequently building and flying my UK Aerobat, I was unhappy with the Hyperion's lack of stiffness. So, I retained the original symmetrical wing and tail feathers, junked the flat plate fuselage, and designed & built a new one. The result I call Hyperion II and I'm very pleased with it!

A few months ago, I was looking for plans for a small electric aerobatic plane and stumbled upon Flymodels.co.uk. There, a Brit by the name of Philip Rawson described a speed 400 electric aerobat he'd designed that looked and sounded like just the ticket. He provides a PDF version of plans for download and a series of photos and description for some of the construction details, but other than that, you're on your own. Construction looked straightforward enough, so I decided to give it a try. If you're not reasonably comfortable with scratch-building techniques and meager instructions, I suggest perhaps trying something else first. However, this is a fun build for someone with at least some experience.

Building