Another couple weeks gone, another update to the thread:
- Oct 15 was my club's first ever drone race event. The guy who runs one of the local multigp chapters got in touch with me a while back wanting to do a race at our field. I took it upon myself to make it happen. It took longer than I had hoped, including a proposal and discussion at a club meeting and holding a vote. But it finally got approved and we held it. A few people at the club volunteered to help out with registration, cooking, etc. and John, the multigp chapter lead, got together the gates and flags and took care of organizing the race rounds and heats. We ended up with 9 pilots racing and a sizable crowd of spectators (12-15 I'd say). We ran 3 rounds with 2 heats in each round. After the three rounds the top five pilots raced a final race. Results can be found here:
http://www.multigp.com/races/view/4516/ ... -the-stars. I had a lot of fun, as did all the pilots. Learned some things that we can hopefully apply next time to make the event even better.
- I picked up a Vortex 250 Pro a few days before the race. I *love* this quad. It is soooo much nicer than the Vortex 285. Very fast. I crashed this thing full bore into a flag pole and it just chipped a little bit off the front left arm. 4mm thick CF arms. 2mm frames with Al standoffs and pieces of 2mm reinforcement in key areas (making a 4mm section of frame plus the 4mm arms in spots). This thing is a nimble tank. No more arms folding back on ground contact. If it crashes and flips upright, 9 out of 10 times I can take off and keep going without issue.
- Been flying the helis too. Botched an auto-rotation landing with the Trex 700 and stripped some servo gears so that's on the bench. I fixed up the KSE 700, but botched an auto-rotation landing with it on Tuesday so need to replace some servo arms and check things for stripped gears. I have a ton of stuff on the bench right now, so I'm going to be spending some time getting the fleet back up and going before winter hits. The bad landings were both with low head speed in the final float/flare down, so no major damage in either case, luckily. I will say, the Goblin 700 KSE (three blades) is a pig to auto-rotate. Goblins are normally tough to auto-rotate. The belt driven tails seem to rob the head speed more than TT. But the three blades are that much worse. Head speed bleeds off like crazy at the bottom. Really need to drop it in and flare spool it up to get a good landing with them. TRex 700, by comparison, is a dream. Floaty. Easy to spool up. Etc.
- I got a new plane! Freewing F/A-18 90mm EDF. Picked it up used on a Facebook group for $250. Brand new plane. Never flown. Did a basic setup and taxied it around the field and spooled it up to full speed without taking off to see if it would be able to lift off the grass field. Looks like it shouldn't be an issue. Need to do some more setup and get the thrust vectoring working then will be doing a maiden.
