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| Approx. 1/5 scale Fleet Finch. #Louis |
Louis Shalako
Brainstorm. I had just spent
$134.00 on a drone that I can fly in my living room.
It is fun, and that’s
all very well. I needed to do something different, for just this once.
Then I got curious. I was looking at these teeny-tiny little helicopters for, literally, $29.95 on Amazon, (exactly 3 1/2" long. – ed.) and that’s when it hit me. What if I looked—just looked, at a proper transmitter…some kits, some ARFs, (almost-ready-to-fly) model aircraft…???
Real, fucking aircraft—in purely relative terms.
Down below, we’ve
linked to a four-channel transmitter, and it’s only…(drum roll please), $135.00,
or about what I paid for the drone.
You see, I also have a
36” wingspan Fokker D-VII in the closet. It's built, it has a brushless motor,
I have two Li-Po batteries for it. It has servos. The old FM transmitter was
obsolete. I took the batteries out before they gooped out and rotted the
innards of the transmitter. What I need is a new transmitter, a new receiver,
and a 12-volt power supply, or I could just charge off the battery in the
vehicle. I need to upgrade to the 2.4 Ghz, modern tech, just for the sake of
safety.
I mean, if you're going to do it, why fuck around.
Electronics are
ridiculously cheap these days. I was looking at CB radios one day, which would
run right here in my apartment off of a
12-V power supply, and you can literally set up for about a hundred bucks
with a cheap radio and a cheap antenna.
And.
I have done all this before—
A simple bench in the
spare bedroom, and I would have the nucleus of a pretty darned good hobby at
minimal cost. Maybe even two hobbies.
***
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| Click to enlarge. |
I am kind of pleased to
see that I held onto that old 12-V/6-V power supply. Lower left foreground, a
pair of Li-Po batteries...a little above that, a portable charger compatible
with Li-Po. There are some old Ni-Cd batteries, a desktop vice, some meters, a
battery cycler/discharger (in red), the obsolete FM Ch. 28 transmitter, and of
course my Fokker D VII. This is equipped with a Frio-10 brushless motor,
mini-servos on elevator, rudder, ailerons, and an ESC, electronic speed control
on the throttle. What I need, is a new transmitter/receiver, and some kind of
benches. Better lighting. I don't know how badly I need to be dragging model
aircraft up and down the stairs, and there is the question of where in the hell
do we fly it.
(Area 52. – ed.)
Looking at the
pictures, we can see a long skinny battery pack that appears to be for the
transmitter. What I can try, is to dig out a trickle charger, plug the battery
into the transmitter, and plug the charging jack into the transmitter and just
see if it takes a charge.
I do not plan on flying
with this radio, but I could at least turn on the radio, plug in the power battery
and discharge the Li-Po batteries. We can run that quiet little electric motor
right in the spare bedroom. I could try charging them, as I purchased that
charger when I went to the brushless motor and Li-Po batteries. I might want to
read up on it first. That only makes sense.
If I dig deep enough, I
might even be able to come up with the manuals.
I have never flown this
aircraft, but all the stuff in the photos has been paid for. There is some food
for thought here. The machine is very dirty after seventeen years of storage.
It will take some time to clean that up. The covering could use a little
tightening. There is a hole in the bottom of the lower left wing. The aileron
hinges are not secure. I need to cut open the covering, align the hinges and
glue them properly. I do have covering of one colour or another, a heat iron,
so all of that is no problem. We can check for warps in the wings while we’re
at it. By the time I take it apart and put it back together again, some of
those long-buried memories might resurface, and the truth is, I actually do
know a fair bit about building and flying R/C aircraft.
***
So, we have an Apollo 25-amp speed control, and there must be a receiver buried in there somewhere. You can see all the screws and access panels.
One of the things I
might consider is to get a soldering iron, some solder, some soldering paste,
and I could simply buy Ni-Cd cells and assemble my own batteries. I have some
reservations about any transmitter that accepts dry cells—the old Futaba sets
came with rechargeable batteries, along with the trickle charger and three
servos when you bought the four-channel radio.
With a transmitter, and
a place to work, we can drive electric dune buggies or pickup trucks, tanks, we
can drive an R/C boat, and while I’ve never done a tank, that might be
interesting if it was fairly large, and not too expensive. What the hell,
right. It would look good in the photographs…I could blog about it.
We can always dream.
***
Background. My old man
was in his mid-fifties when he got the itch to fly a radio control airplane. He’d
grown up with rubber band models. He’d built free-flights with Cox .049 motors
on them. We had control-line airplanes that we flew in Germain Park, at least
until the noise complaints started and the cops started showing up…
I stopped in to see the
father figure one day, and I found him down in the basement working on a
.40-powered trainer aircraft. He had all the equipment, brand-new, all kinds of
tools. It was fascinating to watch a person with some experience, and it wasn’t
very long before I was building one of my own.
We flew together as
often as not, for about fifteen or twenty years, and it was something very
precious in that we shared that passion.
I learned at my
father’s knee, ladies and gentlemen, not even so much as an adult, but as a
very small boy. That kind of thing doesn’t happen so often anymore…that kind of
relationship really is special, when you think about it.
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| Dirty. Where there is an antenna, there must be a receiver...??? |
Frank was a very neat
builder, but we might also consider the hundreds of models he’d covered using
tissue paper and dope. Heat-shrink covering was a revelation, for a guy like
that, someone who’d never had any money way back when. For Frank, with the
house paid off, a good job, a little money in the bank, and a club full of
pretty good guys to refer to, it must have been the dream of a lifetime—a
humble kind of dream, but a dream nevertheless.
END
Learning to Fly the Chubory F-89 Drone.
Cheap Four Channel Transmitter and Receiver.
The Model Aeronautics Association of Canada.
Slinger at 3,000 Feet. Pilot in command, MDW 216. Photography/Sound by Louis.
Here’s my WW I Royal Flying Corps Memoir, Heaven Is Too Far Away.
Thank you for reading, and keeping that dream alive.
Note:
these links are for info only, as I am not into affiliate marketing.
Experiment
1:
plug in dedicated Futaba wall charger and attempt to charge Ni-Cd transmitter
and receiver packs. After four hours of charging, there was zero charge. Tags
on the batteries read 2001 and 2005, so that seems to be that. I can buy a
replacement battery at a later date, assuming I wanted to use that transmitter
for a boat or dune buggy. To fly at the local club or M.A.A.C. events, one
would need a current spec radio system.
Experiment
2: assuming
we get any charge at all in the transmitter, plug a power battery into the
plane and see if we can get the motor to turn, actuate control surfaces.
Bearing in mind the results listed above, this experiment is on hold.
#Louis
