I have a dream............to fly as long as I want

Now with its tail feathers.

Not the most elegant of planes but its primary role is to be an low power weight lifter.
As the batteries are so relatively heavy the initial flights will be done with the wing held on by rubber bands so it can be adjusted to find the best CofG position.

Completed with a temporary Depron pad to prevent the rubber bands damaging the wing, particularly the trailing edge.

And it flies!
Rather sedate and seemed to require rather more 'cruise' power than I expected however after about 10 minutes it seemed to loose power or rather putting on full power no longer made any difference but it continued to cruise ok.
Concerned it was the batteries I landed with no problem (it does float on a bit!) but on picking it up the Depron around the very nose felt quite warm. The batteries were cool.
Further examination showed the motor mounting had come loose so the bell was actually rubbing on the Depron. No wonder it felt warm!
The bit that I rather expected to be an issue (the loose cell batteries) gave no problem at all and each required about the same recharge time suggesting they had shared the load equally.

A bit of surgery on the nose allowed the motor mounting to be reinforced.
At least the CofG is about right so the wing can now be fixed on permanently.

Next to try and determine exactly what is the flying load on the batteries.

Brilliant Simon well done! Did you get a video of it?

Following my usual protocol I don't video maidens on the basis that if it flies I'm happy, if it crashes I don't want a record of it!
I will video the next flight but the weather forecast is horrid (wind, rain and then more rain :woohoo: )

At the moment it is hanging on the wall along with its 'cousins' .

Absolutely calm early this morning so a very boring video of the second flight of the Super Endurance, although technically the maiden of the 'glued on' wing.

A short flight just to test the now fixed CofG and the glue was tested with a loop. :woohoo:

The long grass was extremely wet - the tractor cutting the grass was shrouded in spray!

Just to keep this up to date I did manage a long(ish) flight of 1hr 7minutes before the the ESC reset. Fortunately it does this quickly(<2s) but I could hear the arming beeps so I cut the power and glided in.
It appears these cells have individual low voltage protection so it looks like eventually one cell on each parallel path cut out at the same time and caused the ESC to reset.

The next flight will use a fixed 8x4.3 prop as I think it will be better matched to the motor and probably more efficient as well.

The spinner behind arrangement makes best use of the very small hub on the slow fly prop.

A test on two of the Ultrafire batteries has confirmed their claimed 3000mAh capacity is hopelessly optimistic. Actually just 650mAh at 0.3A! :woohoo:
I see there are versions (and more expensive) of the Ultrafire marketed with a capacity of 5300mAh!! Yeah right!

I have some ex laptop 18650 cells. I will test their capacity to see if they are any better.

A test flight showed that the lighter fixed prop significantly effected the flight stability which would make any sort of duration very hard work.
After examining several options I came to the conclusion that the best way to move the CofG forward was to simply cut the wing off the fuselage and glue it on again 6mm further back! :ohmy:

Clearly with the grossly optimistic capacity claimed for the Ultrafire Li-ion cells a really long endurance is out of the question.
As this plane is virtually the same size and weight as the LiPo powered pusher Endurance I want see is if I can get the tractor Super Endurance down to its same cruise power level of just 1A.
Having completely discharged the six 2s3p 650mAh Li-ion cells in 67 minutes and doing the sums backwards shows that it used an average of 1.7A..
The fixed pitch prop should reduce the average current a bit but at the moment that 1A average looks hard to match let alone exceed.


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