Sweet end of summer day!

A day off, the promise of possibly awesome weather, yeah, we are going flying!

Just took the Pulse XT60 with its RCG-USA 20cc, and the Sbach with its Evolution 10cc.

Jay and Louis were there flying their helis. When I first went up there were a few winds up high, and the rotor at the south end was active, but things calmed down amazingly, and it turned out beautiful just as I had to leave.

So the Sbach is tuned and running well. There was a curious period where in idle when I moved her from the start bench to the ground and held her nose up. The fuel pump failed to maintain flow and she quit. This repeated itself. I decided to just fly her anyway.  After a long flight I held her up again and she ran on fine. She flew well, ran perfectly. She needed some DR/Expo changes. I turned the ailerons down from 40% to 35%, and the elevators to 35%, and she tamed right down with a bit more authority. With the higher expo I was over driving the sticks, and my style is a bit more subtle on the controls. The Sbach is always a twitchy wench, one has to pay attention as she is very unforgiving. Remember, I had to put vortex generators on her wings.  She catches the thermals over the dump parking lot and rises rapidly, and is sensitive in the rotor between the south end Ents and the rise of the landfill we fly on the top of an after rising over the lot, drops like a stone in front of the trees, and then rises again as she approaches the runway on the top of the hill. She isn't unique in this habit, but does seem more affected. Combine that with a tail wind on the base in front of the trees and a 90 degree crosswind on final, and it can take 2-3 approaches before we get wheels down. And then we are hauling ass, so we run out of runway fast. FUN!

She doesn't have a lot of power, is fast, but runs out of vertical fast. That's with the 13x8 two blade. I decided to look at the 12x8 three again, so will fly her that way.

Incidentally, at the field her power switch failed. Noticed that the vibration when the engine was running was making the light blink.. I had my suspicions this past week and today she was twitching her surfaces like crazy and the engine was missing. We figured out it was the switch with that blinl, so I was flying her by connecting the battery directly to the reciever. This evening I replaced it with another one, exactly the same, and she is behaving.

I also flew the Pulse XT60. she flew without any drama. She still sputters in the midrange, but idles well and has plenty of power! She wasn't bothered too much by the winds, but that Hershey Bar wing liftes in the crosswinds. 

I now have them in the normal rotation!