The Floater Jet has been out of action for a long time due to minor wing damage, elevator pushrods needing replacement, motor removed and being short of prop adapter.
Finally, all the pieces were in place, literally, with the last piece of the jigsaw, a three-bladed pusher prop. What's special about this prop is that it's actually designed for pushers; if you've ever had one you'll know they're very noisy using standard propellors. I'm not sure why, but I can tell you that's the case.
The pusher prop is a 6x4 which fits the Floater well, and being a three-blade looks pretty cool as well. The one catch is it's spins anti-clockwise, i.e. in the opposite direction to most propellors. However this is easy enough to fix, as you just need to swap two connectors on your ESC.
So this afternoon, as soon as I'd finished refurbishing the Floater, I headed out to the field to give it a test flight. Having been a while since I'd flown it, and with it having the different-style propellor, I was a little nervous. However, my concerns soon vanished as the Floater climbed into the sky.
The prop is quiet, in fact remarkably so, spinning with just a bit of a whine, and certainly nothing like the droning buzz it makes with the regular prop. It's even pretty quiet on full throttle and producing plenty of thrust as evidenced by the rate at which the Floater climbed.
The flight was actually most enjoyable with the quiet performance, improved elevator response and gorgeous backdrop of dramatically illuminated evening clouds.
A good test flight all round...
No comments:
Post a Comment