Question: Is your state Massachusetts by any chance?Wabbit wrote:So, I've been doing helicopters for two years now and have gone through numerous iterations of my own designs, yet I feel like I must be missing some fundamental piece of the puzzle and was hoping someone here could help me out.
For context, my state banned the use of kits this year. I'm generally in support of the policy, since, at least to me, the thing that makes helicopters fun is coming up with your own designs. This means that getting one of the Freedom Flight Models kits is off the table for me as an option, but since the ban isn't in effect for most of the country, it can be hard to find solid advice on how to build a good helicopter from scratch.
Feeling like it would be too difficult to build a chinook, especially without a kit or set of plans to go off of, and knowing that other teams in my state also will have trouble utilizing the bonus due to the ban, I decided to go with a more standard design this year. So far, despite getting my helicopter to be super lightweight (just over 3.0 g), I haven't been able to do much better than about 45-50 second flight times. The most obvious reason for this is that I haven't been able to put more than roughly 300 total winds in my motor. This is an obvious difference between my design and some of the better ones from last year which, if I'm not mistaken, were using upwards of 1500 winds. The other main difference between my designs and objectively better ones is that my frame is significantly shorter, probably only about 30 cm long instead of what appeared to be closer to 90 cm long frames that were being used by the kits from last year.
So, then, the fix should be obvious to me, right? I make a much longer frame which allows me to use a much longer rubber band thereby allowing me to put in many more winds. But this hasn't worked. Every time I try to go with a longer rubber band, a larger frame, or both, I end up getting much shorter flight times. I would imagine this is due to the helicopter as a whole weighing significantly more. Even if I manage to keep the frame lightweight, the added length of the rubber motor makes the whole thing a lot heavier. I've experimented with every possible combination of sizes, and, using my current rotors, the thing that has worked the best is a super small frame with a relatively short rubber band. But I know from seeing other teams at competitions that this sort of design isn't supposed to yield good results, nor has it yet been able to replicate the times of even moderately good teams.
So I guess my question is, what were the kits from last year doing differently? How was it that they were able to use such a long rubber motor and such a large frame without the whole thing weighing way too much?
Thanks for your help!
Last year I received 1st place in Massachusetts without Dave Zeigler's kit. This is because the event coordinator placed a significant penalty on all teams that flew the kit with its Carbon Fiber and Kevlar. My design looked somewhat similar to Mr.Zeigler's (great guy btw). My time was about 63 seconds without any bonuses. If you are interested I can dig it up and try to send you a picture it is a coaxial design.
