Brodak Legacy control line stunter

Here is my 'new' Brodak Legacy electric powered. It has a 12 x 6 reverse direction prop, takes a 4 cell 4000mAH Lipo.

New Control Line Circle at Trentham, Upper Hutt

We now have a control line circle at Trentham to encourage the flying of control line at our club. We are still trying to get the size right (58' lines are ok but not much more). Here is me flying on said circle.

Moving pictures of my flight at Trentham.

Te Whiti Park - Lower Hutt New Zealand on 19/02/2013

This was a great night. Good turnout. Calm warm conditions however there was little lift for the gliders. Even so, a great night.

Dual switches on my 46 3D plane

I have been reading about HobbyKing receiver switches and the cheaper ones appear to be single throw switches so if the switch bec

omes dirty over time, you could have issues or even a crash. So I ordered some more cheap ones (!) and have wired 2 switches in parallel to build in some redundancy. I used a Y lead but the connectors are all round the wrong way! So I took the plugs off the wires and solders some and put other plugs on the others. Seen is the switch harness.

Resoldering a Lipo battery

I have a 4S lipo from Hobby King which had 2 of the charging wires break. I wasn't sure about resoldering it. Some would dump it but I prefer to get as much use out of things before I dump them. I noticed on a Hobby King forum that a guy had the same issue and did resolder the wires... so I decided to try. I carefully broke the cover for the battery. The positive and a white wire had broke (then the black broke too!). The positive was pretty obvious but the the other one I wasn't so sure about. Turns out it was one of the middle cells. The only real problem I had was the soldering iron to use. My 25W didn't really have enough power to get a good solder joint. However my 80W; the bit was too big to get near the area to solder so I had to use the 25W. Eventually I managed to get enough heat and the joints appear to be strong enough.

Just a warning though. This battery is a 4000mAH 4 cell. It packs a punch if you short circuit it. Be very careful if you do this. If you are unsure, get some help or dispose of the battery.

This is a great site for technical aspects of lipos Lipo technical details

3D 46 size rc model plane

Here is my 3D 46 size machine. Its a chinese RTF, not sure who made it but it was cheaper as there were some pieces missing and the covering had some issues. Actually she doesn't look too bad with her colour scheme. I modified the servo positions.

Its a honey at slow speeds although I have wound down the control movements until I get used to it. Up front is a GMS 46 II with a non GMS muffler.

Beware of cheap connectors

I used this connector in my Fascination 15 and after a slight 'incident', found that that it slipped over the thread on the pushrod. May well have contributed to the crash. Use good quality connectors even in fairly small models.