12/22/2001

Bill  "The Man" Meador  the only guy I trust with the controles
 

Here I am moving from, holding the Rig by the wing to holding it by the nose. After 3-4min of this
my shoes are getting hot and the grass is not doing so well.
 
 

In this shot we were testing the roll fan with a heavy plane. I was holding the plane up with my finger
as it just did not have enough thrust to stay steady. My left hand is very loose so Bill can check the
roll fan. The roll fan is just not powerfull enough to correct if the rig rolls more than ~20deg.
 
 
 

That aluminum plate is 0.5 inchs thick and is way too hot to touch. When the plane is stable, and the wind is
not blowing, it can held with one hand...
 

I moved it up here to see if it made any differance. Nothing changed.

These pics were taken 12/22/01 and after 5 flights, this thing just may work.
On the 3rd and 4th flight, I was letting the Rig go for up to a sec or two and
Bill would make corrections and the Rig would respond.

As of now there are 2 main problem.
1) Thrust... Full of fuel it can't hold its self up. Only
with 1 min of fuel remaining does it become stable in
the vertical.

2) Control... The Pitch,and Yaw seemed to be ok the the roll
control is just not there. We bypassed the speed controler and
plugged the tail rotor directly in to the 3000 mah battery and
this helped a lot, but the 30 size tail rotor is just too small
even spinning fast enough to fling the blades off on the 5th
flight.

Each of these problems is fixable. First, the turbine will
be replaced with a 42 lb instead of 28 lbs. Second, I will
mount 2 x 60 size tail rotors in the end of each wing. Not
on the leading edge to out pass the tip to get it farther
from the center.

This is a lot of work because 3-4 battery packs will
have to be moved from inside the wing to where ever
it takes to balance the Rig in two directions.

Just to let you know what is take to run this Rig, here is a list
of the batteries on board right now

6 cell 3000mah NiMH  Pitch fan
6 cell 3000mah NiMH  Roll fan
6 cell 3000mah NiMH  Yaw fan
5 cell 1600mah NiMH receiver pack
5 cell 1600mah NiMH receiver pack
8 cell 1400mah NiCad AMT fuel pump

The 3000 NiMH pack are used in RC cars where they pull 30-50 amps no problem
 
 
 
 
 
 

This pics were taken with out any of the tail rotors running.d
 

Just trying to wake the neighbors. That all.