Category: <span>Prop Planes</span>

Another 62″ AJ Acuity Pattern Plane

I just assembled my 4th Acuity. My first one was a 62″ that I bought when I started flying pattern. I soon bought a 2m Acuity and flew it and eventually sold my 62″ version. A few years later, after lightly crashing the original due to a faulty cheapo servo cable, I bought another 2m Acuity. They really are hard to beat, either version, for the money. I’ve had much more expensive planes, but the Acuity stands its ground when compared.

After deciding last year not to travel for pattern contests any longer, I scaled things down so I don’t have to have to accommodate 2m planes. So I sold my 2m planes and bought another 62″ Acuity.

This Acuity is far and away the best quality I’ve seen on one yet. The others were all fine, but this one was perfect. I haven’t purchased many ARF airframes that didn’t need at least something to make the setup measurements perfect. No need for blades, shims or sanding on this one.

The canopy attachment did require work to use without the supplied thumb screws. I added a small piece of light ply, some fiberglass cloth and some Epoxy and was able to create a nest for the spring loaded canopy latch attached to the fuse. I basically filled n the area between the rear screw for the Tcan and the rear edge of the canopy with glass cloth and epoxy, let it set then drilled it out and coated it with thick CA and accelerator. I sanded inside the hole and now it’s a hard area for the canopy latch to hold on to. In the past, I have just used the thumbscrews to hold on the canopy. I am determined on this one to use only the top latch. We’ll see…

I already had the AJ motor used for 5s on this plane. I bought it for a project that I have yet to complete, so I reappropriated it 😉 It is the AJ4025-14P 485kv. It appears to match perfectly with a Hacker A50 12s when compared on eCalc. The Hacker is rated at 480kv is the only difference. So this plane will run on 5s power. It will help with weight for sure.

My first 62″ Acuity was powered by 6s with a Hacker A50 16s, which is the 6s version. It had boatloads of power and was always a little nose heavy, even when I moved the rudder servo to the aft position. You might think that running the same plane on the same prop and getting more thrust on 5s than on 6s isn’t possible. Look at the two images below. They are eCalc profiles of this plane with the 5s motor and the 6s motor. You give up a little flight time, and maybe tax the motor just a little more on 5s, but overall, the 5s setup is more efficient. It generates about 10% more static thrust on 5s.

My 6s Acuity was 3600g all up. This 5s version is 3060.

EDIT:
Before even flying this plane, I was looking for a motor for another plane and came across a Scorpion SII 4025 440Kv motor. This motor weighs less than the AJ motor I planned to use and gives this Acuity all the power it would ever need. So I installed the Scorpion motor. It bolted right up to the pre-drilled holes on the plane. It added 1.8mm to the gap between my spinner backplate and cowl, but I had it fit very closely before, so I’m not going to re-drill my mounting holes on the cowl. I’m good with a 2mm or less gap. I have included an eCalc profile below for the plane with this motor. It has tone of power and hardly taxes the motor at all. I might have just found a new favorite motor.

SECOND EDIT:

The Scorpion motor mentioned above is a total bad ass of a motor, but it is just too much for this plane. I would never use the top half of the throttle range, so I took it off and will use it on the new upcoming project, a Super Chipmunk in the Art Scholl scheme. I went back to the AJ 4025-14P on 5s for the Acuity. It gives me all the power I need and we lose almost 5 ounces going from 6s to 5s.

After a few flights, this 62″ Acuity flies beautifully. These planes really do offer great value.

I used MKS HV69 servos for all surfaces on this plane. These are great servos for a plane this size. They center very well and perform very well when running on straight 2s lipo power. I use a 1000mAh 2s Lipo for the radio and can fly all day without needing a charge on the system battery.

The HV69 requires a little bit of changes in the servo bays. I add a small piece of 1/8″ ply to extend the area where the servo is screwed down. I make lite ply covers and fit the HV69 in them. It requires just a little work, but gives you lightweight, powerful, fast servos that don’t require a voltage regulator. The servos are very stable because the lite ply cover holds them in place when screwed down.

I haven’t flown this plane yet. I plan to in about a week.

CK Aero Allure Pattern Plane

OK, so there for a while, I might have gone pattern plane crazy. A friend had this Allure ready to fly and wanted to sell it. So I drove down to Houston and bought it. This was a great flying airplane. It flew better than the Alchemy I built in my opinion.

I flew this plane for a year or two and ended up selling it and moving on. I guess my attention span is kinda short with things like this, but I feel like I need to try all of the different planes.

These CK Aero planes are the real deal. They are pricey, but there are deals to be found on them either used or at the end of the year, like when I bought the Alchemy builder’s kit.

Bryan Hebert and I worked together back in the early 80’s. We both flew RC back then as well. I have known him for a long time and can say that he is a straight up guy and a good person to do business with.

CKAero Alchemy Pattern Plane

At the end of the year, Bryan Hebert at CK Aero had one Alchemy builder’s kit left. This is the plane with a prebuilt and painted fiberglass fuselage with foam wing and stab cores.

This was my first balsa over foam sheeting job in a long time, but it came out really great. I originally fitted the plane with a Hacker Q80, but ended up putting a Plettenberg Advance in it and it performed much better.

The plane flew very well. I ended up selling it to a friend because I had two other pattern planes and didn’t have room for them all.

Acuity 62″ Pattern Plane – AJ Aircraft

So after about a year back in RC, I got bit by the pattern bug. I looked around and contacted some friends to see what I might have been able to buy used from someone, but didn’t really find exactly what I wanted.

On the recommendation of a friend, I looked at AJ Aircraft’s Acuity. It comes in a 2 meter version as well as a 62″ version. For many reasons, mostly because this will be my first season to fly pattern, I went with the 62″ version. Also, I already had the 6s 5000 mah batteries that I needed to run this plane as it would be set up.

I set this plane up with a Hacker A50-16s. I used a Castle Creations Edge 100 amp esc, which is too much, but again, what I had and perfectly suitable for that setup, so on it went.

I propped it with a XOAR 16-10e wooden prop for now. The 16-10 seems to pull it just fine. It is not fast and I do use WOT in an upline, but it has plenty of power and great flight times. After 7 minutes of pattern flight, I still have about 20-25% of my battery left.

I moved to this plane from my Kaos. It is much different than the Kaos. After flying this plane for a while, the Kaos feels like it weighs 3x as much, even though it doesn’t. AUW on the Kaos, with the 6s/5000 is 7lb 14.6 oz. AUW on the Acuity 62″ with the same battery is 6lb 15.4 oz, so it’s really only about a pound lighter. The Acuity is so much more maneuverable and so much more agile… it’s a joy to fly. Learning to fly the pattern with the Acuity in a crosswind is more tricky as it is more susceptible to deviation from crosswinds. It “weathervanes” more than the Kaos did. A wise person told me that learning to fly pattern is all about learning to use the rudder, and that is correct in my experience.

WEIGHT BREAKDOWN

Fuselage (rtf no batt): 3 lb. 14.4 oz.

Canopy and thumb screws: 5.6 oz.

Right Wing: 8.3 oz.

Left Wing: 8.4 oz.

Wing Tube: 1.2 oz.

Gensace 6s/5000mah Lipo: 1 lb. 9.5 oz.

Total AUW RTF: 6 lb. 15.4 oz.

The CG is supposed to be about a half inch behind the wing tube. With my 6s/5000 all the way forward, mine balanced perfectly. This is great because when I move the CG back later on as I set it up for snap rolls and other maneuvers that perform better with a CG further back, I simple will move my battery back on the tray. There is a good 3-4″ to do this. I’m not sure if this was incorporated into the design, but it worked out perfectly at least on my model.

I set my plane up very simply with a Spectrum AR610 receiver and Hitec Digital Mighty Mini servos for elevator and ailerons and a full size high torque Hitec digital rudder servo. I am not running a separate receiver battery.

Overall, I love this airplane. For about $450 delivered, I found it to be a great value for an entry level pattern plane. It will no doubt carry me much further than the Sportsman class as well.

It was packed brilliantly in a large box with lots of compartments and using lots of tape… instead of styrofoam. It had foam where needed, but it is very smartly packed in a non-wasteful (and easy to dispose of) way. Assembly is very simple and straightforward using the PDF building plans available on AJ’s web site.

Below is an eCalc report on the setup of my Acuity 62″.

eCalc result for Acuity 62″ setup with Hacker A50-16s on 6s/5000mah lipo with 16-10 prop

EDIT 5/31/18

I’m a little over 100 flights in and loving this plane. I haven’t pushed it aerobatically. I’m sticking to perfecting the Sportsmans pattern with it. It’s competitive against the litany of 2 meter planes that i have faced in competition as long as my thumbs are cooperative.

I’ll soon be ordering the 2m version and moving the 62” to backup status.

Tower Hobbies WW II Foamies: P-51, Corsair, Hellcat

Tower Hobbies makes a line of foam PNP airplanes at the $105 – $120 price range that are really good planes for the money. My Millennium Master is the civil aviation part of that line. The warbirds are a Corsair, four flavors of P-51 and a Hellcat. These are plug-n-play foam planes that fly well on 3s and are tough. The Corsair seems to be the toughest, as you can see by the number of them in the photo below.

Smiling faces. Before the Gaggle. Photo: Dave Schaefer

We fly them aggressively, all at once and generally in the same area. This presents several challenges to the pilot and generates lots of energy among the group. Just keeping up with your own airplane is sometimes a challenge. It is inevitable that two of them share the same airspace at some point. These planes are amazingly tough and still fly well after multiple major repairs. This is defined at our club as a Gaggle.

Ace GLH Electric Conversion

One of my favorite planes to fly back in the day was the Ace GLH with a Cox Tee Dee .051. Of course those planes are long gone now… or are they? At a swap meet I discovered short kits. Because of the affordability of laser cutters these days, there are lots of guys out there cutting these old kits that are no longer in production. The selection seems nearly endless.

I found the GLH short kit at Balsa Workbench. I got great quality parts for two GLH planes. Dealing with Rob was easy. The short kits include basically all curved cut wood. The sheeting, leading and trailing edges and spars are not included. Still, for a $20 short kit and a bit of balsa stock, I’m flying a fast blast from the past.

I found the plans on Outerzone. You can also download the GLH plans here. I opened them in Adobe Reader and printed them from there. Adobe gives you an option to print a large document in tiles and you can even include cut lines so you can assemble the full-size plans with accuracy.

The Power Setup

For the first one, I ended up with a 2450 kv, 18.5 mm Lumenier drone motor. I run it on a 3s/1000mah 25c lipo with a 6-5.5 APC prop and it checks out perfectly on the meter and runs great. It generates ~35 oz. of thrust and flies the plane in the 85 mph range. It’s a handful to fly and took several flights to get it trimmed out nicely, but once that’s done, it’s really a smooth flyer and handles wind amazingly well for a 19 oz. plane.

GLH II

I built this one a little differently. I used a motor from an EDF. Details on the setup are in the slideshow. Ecalc was spot on in the calculations for this power combo. It’s a screamer!

Tower Hobbies Kaos 60 ARF – Electric Power

The Kaos is a classic style for sport/pattern flyers. It’s stable, aerobatic and the long moment really makes this a predictable and smooth flying plane.

I have never bought an ARF and assembled it. I bought my Tucano used but not flown, so the Kaos was my first complete ARF experience.

There are at least three of these that I know of in my club. I wanted to make mine different and the modeler in me told me that if I didn’t have a substantial time investment in the build that I wouldn’t enjoy it as much. For those reasons, I decided to remove the covering on the ARF and make this plane my own.

I went with metallic finish Monokote for the job. Removing the old covering was very easy. The first step in the assembly process for this plane is to heat up and make sure the factory covering is all stuck well. They don’t get too detailed making sure everything is stuck well from the factory. For this reason, the old covering came off very easily with my heat gun.

I fitted this plane with the Rimfire 80 from Tower Hobbies. It’s a lower RPM motor than the 60. At a 500 Kv rating, it will swing a larger prop at a lower RPM. I installed a Castle Creations 100 amp ESC to go with it and fitted it with a 15-8 prop and powered it all with a 6s 5000mah lipo. It has about 2″ clearance with the larger diameter prop.

It flies very well. It is quiet and has lots of reserve power. Flying weight is 7 lb 14.6 oz. and it took 4 oz in the nose to get the CG to the 4.5″ location I wanted.

The Bolt-on Tail

The plans for this plane tell you not to glue the tail together, but to use the bolt to bolt it down. It all fits together very well, but this goes against everything I have ever learned about RC aircraft. I called Tower Hobbies and spoke to their support people. What I got was that they have not had problems with the bolt-on setup, but if it were his own personal plane, the guy I spoke with would glue the tail together. That was enough for me to mix a batch of epoxy and do just that.

Phoenix Models Tucano GP/EP ARF

I rescued this airplane from hanging from the ceiling in my local hobby shop on consignment. It is an ARF (Almost-Ready-to-Fly) model. It had the electric motor and the speed control and all of the radio equipment installed.

This airplane is made to accept retractable landing gear. Today’s modeler can get all kinds of landing gear that don’t require any outside servo. They just plug right in to the radio and mount onto the plane and you’re off and running with retracts. The problem is, you hear people complain about them a LOT. You see them fail a LOT. Tower Hobbies had these retracts that are made just for this airplane. They require servos to do the work, but I find them a lot more reliable and durable than the cheaper servoless models. Plus they are kinda old school, so I went with them.

The guy who put it together mounted an Elite Power 52 Brushless motor on it. This motor is rated at 590 K/V and will take a 6S battery. With the extra weight of the two retract servos, I opted for 6S power. I propped it with an APC 12-10. It has a Castle Creations Lite 100 ESC that seems to work just fine. It has a consistent beep every few seconds to let you know that it is armed. The instructions say you can remove that beep if you use Castle’s programming interface for the ESC. Problem is, this works only on Windows computers and I haven’t had a Windows computer in my house since the early 2000s. So I live with the beep.

With the Power 52 motor and the 6S 45C 5000mah battery, I get crazy fast flight for about 5 minutes. The plane sets up and lands better than anything I have. It is smooth and very, very stable on landings.

I added 3.5 oz to the tail to get it to balance.

Overall, I really like this airplane. It’s very aerobatic and has lots of reserve power. I get lots of comments on it.

E-flite UMX Pitts S-1S

I’ve always loved the Pitts Biplane. It’s a great looking airplane and quite popular in the world of RC.

After such a great experience with the UMX A-10, I got the Pitts, hoping that it would be as much fun… and it is. It’s a great flyer, very nimble and has plenty of power to get through most any maneuver right out of the box.

Like the A-10, this one is also Bind-n-Fly. The battery that you fly it with only has ne connector, so you do have to buy a special splitter to be able to connect to a balance charger via the power port and the balance port. That connector was $5 I think.

It flies on a 2s 200 mah lipo. Flights aren’t terribly long, maybe 4-5 minutes at full throttle. This one also has the ASX3 stabilization and it works beautifully. For being as quick and as tricky as this plane is, it is still pretty stable… incredibly stable for a plane this size. It’s tiny at just a hair over 17″ wingspan.

Again for the $125 or so that this thing will set you back, it’s a great buy. I managed to fly this airplane into a chicken wire fence at full throttle on a downwind run. It literally slammed head on in to this fencing. I had to buy a new hatch cover. That cost $8 and I was right back in the air. It’s tough!

Tower Hobbies Millennium Master EP – Foamie Paint Job

I’ve always liked Tower products and this Millennium Master plane looked like fun for the money. It flies really well for a foam plane. It actually flies as well as any of the wood planes I have. It’s small and lightweight, so winds over 10-12 mph keep it in the hangar.

I did a little research on painting foam aircraft and found that Krylon Short Cuts seemed to be what I needed. It’s gentle on foam, but if you spray too close to the foam, the accelerant will eat the finish off of your foam, so be careful.

My plan was to cover the existing scheme. The purple covered very well in two coats. The yellow didn’t cover at all. After several coats of yellow and the stock trim still showing, I had to paint the fuse purple as well and do it that way. So the paint covers well in dark colors at least.

A roadblock I encountered in doing this is that masking tape, even the soft blue tape, pulls the original paint off of the plane. So if you mask it and paint it, everything between the tape and the foam comes off on the tape. A little more research and I saw about people using Post-It Notes to mask with.

I grabbed a stack of Post-It Notes and to my surprise, I realized that the notes of today are all sticky on the back with only a small edge being not sticky. They used to be the opposite of that, with a row of sticky across the top.

So I laid out about ten Post-It Notes sticky side down, in a line, overlapping them by about a quarter inch. Then I put regular masking tape on the non-sticky side to hold them all together. Then I was about to cut that to make straight lines or whatever I wanted to do, essentially making masking strips out of Post-It Notes. I didn’t take any photos of that process. I will the next time I paint foam and will post them here.