R/C Airplane

[Gwyn]

Check out my sweet new ride :p

I got it as an early birthday gift.

[Databits]

Nifty!

Now, can you fly it??

[Gwyn]

No idea, it was too windy last weekend and I have to wait for the weekend again to try again as it gets dark here at 4:30, so no luck flying it in the evening after work.

[Xepher]

I used to be really into RC planes when I was a kid. I saved FOREVER to buy the kit to build my first one. It was one of those kits that came with about 12 blue-prints, and a bunch of balsa sticks. You had to cut and build everything from scratch. Took me about 6 months, but when I finished, and fired up that nitro engine for the first time... most awesome toy EVER! Of course, I never got really good at flying. It's incredibly tricky when you're looking at it from weird angles and a distance. Ended up crash landing on a highway when it ran out of gas one time though, and bent the front landing gear.

Of course, instead of repairing it, I just built a new one... this time a high performance stunt plane. Took that sucker out and my instructor nearly freaked out about how stupidly fast and manuverable it was. I'd of course, modified the plans a bit to fit the same, larger-than-spec engine into it, so I wouldn't have to buy a new, smaller one. This thing was just too fast, could do a full roll in a fraction of a second, literally. The elevator cable apparently couldn't take the stress, and snapped during that first flight. The whole thing came barreling in at us on the ground. Hit probably doing 80-90mph, almost directly down. Nothing left but splinters. The fuel tank broke, and the battery cable was shorting out in the wreckage, so it actually caught fire even. Spectacular wreck, but put me off planes for a while.

I eventually repaired the first one, the trainer, but didn't fly it for years. Tried a few more times after moving to texas, and got a bit better at it, then just got kinda bored. Finally my friends dared me to take it out one day at the end of high school. It was windy but I thought "who cares?" It was so windy the thing fell out of the sky as soon as I turned with the wind and lost all lift. Smash! Finally let me parents sell all of it at a garage sale for like 50 bucks (I'd probably spent $700 on things) with the condition that it goes to a kid who actually wants to fly it. Supposedly it did.


Anyway, best of luck to you. We want photos of the crash! :-P

[Gwyn]

Yeah I'm expecting to crash it a few times, with video!. It's only made of foam so I'm hoping it wont crash into 100 pieces and I can put it back together. I actually have a smaller plane as well that was for my birthday (my birthday is on dec 22 and the cessna one is for a Christmas gift.) I was *supposed* to learn on this smaller one for a few weeks while waiting for the cessna to get in. We didn't get the right batteries for the small plane and when we adapted a bigger battery (that was too heavy for it anyway)we found out that the receiver didn't work as well. So now we are waiting on those parts for my small one and the cessna just happened to show up first.

All the stuff Andrew and I have right now is battery powered although I do want to get a nitro R/C offroad truck, and gas airplane sometime :p. I'll learn on the battery stuff though.

[Gwyn]

I did not get out .

We had some flurries on Sunday and I had to work Saturday and my mom also came into town to surprise me.

OH WELL.

[Gwyn]

And now there is 20 cm of snow on the ground