Fun with Generic, Non-Threatening Title

Roddie’s post on the Golden Bee thread reminded me that I had put this aside for later until I could re-work the power pod the engine is in.  The engine runs fine, but I found that the hard tank I used didn’t give a good engine run, so I figured I’d make some time eventually to do a balloon tank.  Besides, I’d been using a wing from another plane to fly the new plane.  So, last night I modified the mounting pod for a balloon tank and made up a new wing from some scrap coroplast.

With the balloon tank, the pipe bomb was running at right around 17K on the 5x3 rubber ducky, so I took the plane out this morning for a quick test.  Also, it gave me a chance to finally test out my hatcam I made a couple of months ago.  The plane is heavy at 8 ounces dry, and the plane is really only suited to training use, so the included video is mostly just 4 minutes of roundy-roundy with a couple of wing overs.  An ounce of fuel gives about 7 minutes on the pipe bomb engine.  Not bad.  Just under two hours of flying on one quart of fuel.

The video starts in mid-flight because about a minute or so into the flight, I remembered I forgot to turn on my hatcam.  So, I had to take off the hat and turn on the hat cam one-handed while trying to keep the plane flying level.  It didn’t help that I couldn’t remember which button to push and the buttons were all matte black with recessed symbols on them.  It wasn’t immediately obvious which buttons did what.




The field I flew at is obviously not very good for a hatcam, as there are so many trees flying by in the background that it’s kinda distracting.  But at least the plane is pretty well centered in the video.  Using my handy dandy circular slide rule I made up, I calculated the plane is flying a blistering 35 MPH on the 5x3 prop and the 33’ lines I have on the handle.  The wind was picking up towards the end of the flight, so I settled for just the one flight as proof that the mounting pod works.

Now, I figured I’ve proven that the pipe bombs can be flown on a simple to make mount, so Phase II is to make some planes specifically for the pipe bomb that will give decent performance.  I skipped from the BTC-2 line to the BTC-4 line, so maybe I’ll backfill the BTC-3 line for using Testors/Wen-Mac engines.

The Transitioning Mark