brainwagon

Okay, yesterday I admitted that I could not do math. According to Sean Foster’s hints on trainer design, the horizontal stabilizer should have had an area of between 20 and 30 percent of the area of the main wing. My main wing is 30 inches with a six inch chord, so it has an area […]

I haven’t done much flying this week, in part because we’ve begun to get some rain here in the SF Bay Area, but also because I have just been having difficulty controlling the Nutball. I began to think that what I needed was a proper trainer airplane. A couple of weeks ago, I read this […]

As I was watching Vogelsong pitch a gem against the Cardinals, I thought it might be cool to try some additional experiments with paper/foamcraft and try to create a simple (even trivial) wing from some Dollar Tree foamboard. I had previously experimented with building an Armin wing as described by Ed at Experimental Airlines. It […]

Carmen suggested that we try to go out and fly my Nutball, since she hadn’t seen it in the air before. Our local park seemed too small, and Cesar Chavez turned out to be windy, so we did a quick websearch and discovered that the Lime Ridge open area in Concord was popular with fliers, […]

Okay, my last blog mentioned the over-pressure situation aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch. Today, I experienced my own launch failure: flying my homebrew Nutball RC plane. This was my “new, improved” version, with a swappable fuselage, and 5 degrees of down angle on the motor. Mark Harrison and I decided to get out and […]

I’m waiting for new props and the like to arrive for more RC fun, but in the mean time I tried to satisfy some curiousity that I had regarding the “trainer” mode that my Turnigy 9X transmitter has. The idea is that if you have a master flyer (like my friend Mark) and a complete […]

I apologize for not updating my blog recently, but sometimes life intervenes, and it seems like you just aren’t doing too much that would be of interest. A combination of a home burglary, increased load at work, and perhaps just a touch of malaise brought on by the political season has meant that come evening, […]

Earlier today, I tweeted: Okay, all major parts assembled.Now I just need the innards from Hobby King… twitter.com/brainwagon/sta… — Mark VandeWettering (@brainwagon) September 17, 2012 But I figured you guys might like some additional details. As I mentioned before, I decided to build a clone of the Axon, a nice light FPV platform designed by […]

Early on Sunday I was out at Home Depot and acquired some additional raw materials for my RC plane construction projects. I got a 4×8 foot sheet of 0.5″ pink foam, a 36″ chunk of 2″ angle iron, and a new 4 foot steel ruler (I know I had one somewhere, but darned if I […]

I was feeling pretty lazy today, but I still wanted to do something working toward an eventual new scratchbuilt RC plane project. I’ve been watching a lot of stuff on YouTube, most notably the videos by the Joshes at flitetest and the great YouTube channel of Experimental Airlines. Experimental Airlines seems especially great: he makes […]

Mark H. over at Eastbay RC and I finally got together to test out my first attempt at scratch building a radio controlled aircraft: an F-22 inspired “foamie”, which an aircraft constructed entirely from EPP foam, hot glue, a couple of short carbon fiber rods to stiffen, and hot glue. Did I mention the hot […]

I received my second email inquiry yesterday (yes, two whole emails) asking me why I hadn’t been posting to brainwagon lately. It’s gratifying that both of my readers would each send me a note asking if things were all right, so I thought rather than addressing you each separately, I could double my efficiency by […]

Okay, I haven’t made a lot of headway, but I did at least print out the pattern for my F-22 and cut the pieces for it. It’s literally the very first time I’ve done this, so the pieces aren’t perfect, but they aren’t bad. Witness: I basically made the patterns by printing out the pieces, […]

Do I really need another hobby? Sigh. Oh well, it appears that whether I need one or not, I’ve taken my first tentative steps into the world of radio controlled airplanes, and I have Mark H. of the Eastbay RC blog to blame. Mark is a fellow Pixarian, and has lately been sucked into the […]