Pictures

My Baby! A Sukhoi 31M by EZ, which is distributed by Yellow Aircraft. It has a wingspan of I think 54" and I'm using an Enya 53 4-stroke. All-up weight is 5 1/2 lbs. It took almost 4 months to build this ARF (it was a bad summer), but it goes and goes well.

Actually...it used to go well. I just had a mishap with it that has it in the shop at the moment. I had just taken off and the prop spun off at about 20 ft. BANG!...the spinner hand-grenaded out through the cowl. I was able to wrestle it back to the ground, somewhat ungracefully, but pretty good considering the lack of altitude, lack of runway, and a 10 MPH headwind. All the louvers were wasted, the cowl was broken in about 16 places, and the wing was stressed enough the pull the sheeting apart on the bottom near the root. We'll find out how strong it is at the bottom of the next loop!

NOW HERE'S THE REAL PISSER...this was the first flight with my new Aiptek Pencam SD. I was running it in movie mode and was going to do a pattern...then that prop thing happened. As I walked down the field I consoled myself with the thought that at least I'd have a cool video...but NOOOO!!!!!!! The landing was just hard enough to pop open the battery cover...NO COOL VIDEO!!! AAAARRRRGGGHH!!!! Some advice to Pencam owners...tape the battery cover shut or you'll lose your cool video if you wreck :(

This is the engine mounting, needle valve, and fueling setup for the Sukhoi. The refueling valve is a Great Planes Easy Fueler. I have a very low opinion of this valve. The idea is right, but the engineering of it is off by just enough that it sticks and/or leaks by design. I'm going to try the Sullivan ball valve fueler once the flying season is completely over for the year.

This was my first 4-stroke engine. It's an O.S. 61FS and I got it from Ebay for $50. It sold so cheaply because it had been wrecked and had the mounting lugs half-assed welded back on. I bought it and spent a little quality time with a file...looks good, runs good. I went through a lot of hassles trying to get some muffler pressure to feed to the tank...the biggest problem being that the early O.S. 4-strokes didn't come with mufflers. I tried making mufflers out of copper fittings (which just shook apart) and rifle shell casings. On my Aircore page you can see a good picture of Big Ugly with a simple and good working muffler made from a 280Rem case. It worked great until the header pipe flange nut broke into 3 pieces from all the fiddle-farting around I'd been doing with it. Oh well, I guess I had to spend the $45 for a whole new muffler after all.

These are some pictures of my club field I took from the Aircore. I used a big, heavy Polaroid PDC640 digital camera with a servo glued to the side with the arm pushing the button. I have a Hitec Flash 5x radio and I set the 5th channel to trip the shutter by tweaking the end points until it clicked the button. This camera was good for this because it'll keep taking pictures as long as the button is pressed and it will hold about 80 pictures...so in one flight I got about 80 pictures of my field and surrounding areas. The camera was mounted on the CG right up against the fuselage, but it still needed 1 1/2 ounces of counterweight on the opposite wing tip to balance.