Hey, is the forum coming back? If so, terrific! With design for 2024 DivB plane

[Little-Acorn]

This is great to see.

Prototype 2024 Science Olympiad DivB plane. 8.2g unballasted without 1.5g motor, 24.5" span. A work in progress.

[ceandra]

Read the announcements section. They are still working to bring back old posts. It is possible that when they are restored new posts will be lost, but we can hope

Chuck

[Little-Acorn]

My DivB students are building and flying this plane, with a shorter wingspan. So far no one (including me) has broken 2 minutes :-( - best so far is 1:55. I'm working on a new prop, 25cm diameter with balsa blades and a perfect (I hope) helical pitch spanwise distribution, and have resurrected my old wind tunnel and data-processing programs from the Electric Wright Stuff days (2022) to test and adjust it. Will hopefully have some results in the next week or so.

Balsa props are approx. 0.25 grams lighter than the Ikara 24cm props, are stiffer, and I haven't broken or cracked one yet. (I probably shouldn't say that too loudly, they will hear me and start breaking right and left    ).

[skylines]

Our team in NW Indiana took first place in FLIGHT at their regional competition at Indiana University Northwest with a 2min, 11 sec flight this morning. We posted a video on Facebook....  https://www.facebook.com/100053211381971/videos/311797701888246

Note that the blowers were not turned off all day even though they planned to have them stopped. The boys studied the drift and launched as best they could to skirt the nasty areas of downwash. The model still got nailed a few times but was able to recover for a technical no-touch flight. Nicely done team!! This team won first place overall so headed to the state finals at Purdue NW in March.

Tom

[ceandra]

We had the ETSU (East Tennessee) Regionals yesterday. Mid school only had two teams do flight, high school about 6 teams.

My team put up a single conservative flight for 3:05. They dewound to a safe margin to avoid obstacles, and flew to about 26.5 feet (girders at 32 feet). The blowers were on, and hammered the plane several times losing precious altitude. However, they knew that score would stand, and they chose to save their plane for States. Had they flown again and gone back up to the tested launch torque to get to 32 feet, the plane would have done right around 4 minutes.

We are flying a custom design with tip dihedral, and a balsa flaring prop at 12" diameter and a molded pitch of 19.5". The blades were set to about 16" pitch to account for flaring, though this may be on the low side. We will test with slightly higher pitch before State.

Second place was 1:51 with a Franken Plane, using what appeared to be a 2017 FFM wing, a J&H Stinger motor stick, and a plastic red prop.

Coach Chuck