Wright Stuff C

jander14indoor
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Re: Wright Stuff C

Post by jander14indoor »

Here's a question I have about kits. There is always a lot of 'noise' about how important it is to have a kit to win or only kits can win. Which allows Wright Stuff to be attacked, unfortunately. Subjectively I don't believe that to be true. Obviously the first place plane wasn't a kit.

Note, I DO recognize the value of kits to getting started.

I'd like to have real data to refute the 'noise', can you post where you placed and whether your plane was a kit? At any level of tournament, just post that info too. Maybe add if you started with a kit.

Thanks,

Jeff Anderson
Livonia, MI
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Re: Wright Stuff C

Post by Nano1llus10n »

jander14indoor wrote:Here's a question I have about kits. There is always a lot of 'noise' about how important it is to have a kit to win or only kits can win. Which allows Wright Stuff to be attacked, unfortunately. Subjectively I don't believe that to be true. Obviously the first place plane wasn't a kit.

Note, I DO recognize the value of kits to getting started.

I'd like to have real data to refute the 'noise', can you post where you placed and whether your plane was a kit? At any level of tournament, just post that info too. Maybe add if you started with a kit.

Thanks,

Jeff Anderson
Livonia, MI
Well at the start of the year, my partner already had some previous experience so we didn't start out with a kit. But eventually, we saw everyone with the kit getting such high times and decided to give it a try. It was a very good basis to start off of and make several modifications too but we also realized much later in the year that the build doesn't matter all that much. It was really matching rubber to prop that made a world of difference. Having a good build is essential but you can't improve that much more compared to what you can do through extensive testing. I would suggest the use of kits and it's not really cheating since you have to make modifications to accommodate that year's challenges anyway so I just use kits for the materials.
[b]Event:[/b] MIT/R/S/N
[b]Anatomy and Physiology:[/b] 8/3/2/26
[b]Helicopters:[/b] 11/-/2/43
[b]Microbe Mission:[/b] 13/2/2/8
[b]Event:[/b] R/S/N
[b]Anatomy and Physiology:[/b] 1/2/8
[b]Designer Genes:[/b] 1/2/4
[b]Protein Modeling:[/b] 1/3/2
[b]Wright Stuff:[/b] 2/2/9


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Re: Wright Stuff C

Post by klastyioer »

Nano1llus10n wrote:
jander14indoor wrote:Here's a question I have about kits. There is always a lot of 'noise' about how important it is to have a kit to win or only kits can win. Which allows Wright Stuff to be attacked, unfortunately. Subjectively I don't believe that to be true. Obviously the first place plane wasn't a kit.

Note, I DO recognize the value of kits to getting started.

I'd like to have real data to refute the 'noise', can you post where you placed and whether your plane was a kit? At any level of tournament, just post that info too. Maybe add if you started with a kit.

Thanks,

Jeff Anderson
Livonia, MI
Well at the start of the year, my partner already had some previous experience so we didn't start out with a kit. But eventually, we saw everyone with the kit getting such high times and decided to give it a try. It was a very good basis to start off of and make several modifications too but we also realized much later in the year that the build doesn't matter all that much. It was really matching rubber to prop that made a world of difference. Having a good build is essential but you can't improve that much more compared to what you can do through extensive testing. I would suggest the use of kits and it's not really cheating since you have to make modifications to accommodate that year's challenges anyway so I just use kits for the materials.
sounds like a pretty good strat
it's not about the medals; go out there and have fun. make progress, learn a few things and have one heck of a time; that's all that matters.

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Re: Wright Stuff C

Post by coachchuckaahs »

jander14indoor wrote:Here's a question I have about kits. There is always a lot of 'noise' about how important it is to have a kit to win or only kits can win. Which allows Wright Stuff to be attacked, unfortunately. Subjectively I don't believe that to be true. Obviously the first place plane wasn't a kit.

Note, I DO recognize the value of kits to getting started.

I'd like to have real data to refute the 'noise', can you post where you placed and whether your plane was a kit? At any level of tournament, just post that info too. Maybe add if you started with a kit.

Thanks,

Jeff Anderson
Livonia, MI
We, of course, do not use kits. A big reason is our Regions and States are so early, we cannot wait for the kits to be produced after the rules hit the street. We were in the gym testing the second week in September! We do use online resources, such as Bill Gowen's Carbon Penny plans as a departure point. I agree that the kit is not critical, that testing and adapting is. We built 28 props this year!

Dave's kit had some influence for our plane last year, but since we took fro Bill, its fine! I think the kits, with very extensive instructions, really help a lot of schools to get started.. However, they do not guarantee success. Maybe 70-80% of the top 10 were Dave's kit,, but then so was 70-80% of the entire 60 teams. The top two teams, at least, were not Dave's kit.

Dave has always honored the "science" nature of this event, giving plenty of adjustments, and leaving room for improvement. Some of the other kits may be easier, because they are more a fixed design, and may be more optimized to be a winning platform. This could become a kit maker's race, but it has not yet. I think the upside of kits, making modeling skills available to many schools (through excellent instructions, and now through Josh's videos) far outweighs the stigma of kits.

The danger is if we get to the "kit of the month club", especially if newer manufacturers update their product throughout the year. Of course, as a scratch building team, we could also build something new each month.

That said, we will always do our own thing!

Coach Chuck
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Nationals Results:
2016 C WS 8th place
2018 B WS 2nd place
2018 C Heli Champion
2019 B ELG 3rd place
2019 C WS Champion
AMA Results: 3 AAHS members qualify for US Jr Team in F1D, 4 new youth senior records
jander14indoor
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Re: Wright Stuff C

Post by jander14indoor »

Don't get me wrong, personally I have no problem with kits. They are especially helpful to get raw teams started and to achieve some level of success. After all, the reason I spend so much time coaching, contributing to this list, etc, is because until a team has a plane that flies, there is NO opportunity to learn science. And we already know how long it takes for a rock to hit the ground!

But the perception (among some influential people at least) is the kits are 'required' to win. I don't agree, but again, that's subjective. I'd love hard DATA. I'm an engineer after all, and this IS Science Olympiad...

So, input from others?

Jeff Anderson
Livonia, MI
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Re: Wright Stuff C

Post by bjt4888 »

Jeff,

My teams use the Freedom Flight kit as a starting point. We use the kit parts to build a custom design that borrows from many others.

In Michigan, I believe that it is not possible to win States without successful custom elements. I like that the kits available raise the level of performance. This makes flying more fun for the students and allows them to pursue excellence.

Of course, the kits don’t perform at a high level without lots of testing and good knowledge of trim adjustments. This year’s unlimited propeller and rubber was a new level of complexity. It took my teams (combined) about 500 test flights, 15 custom propellers (many design variations) and 16 modified Ikara propellers and many different rubber densities to reach their final goal.

Brian T
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Re: Wright Stuff C

Post by NorCalplaya »

jander14indoor wrote:Here's a question I have about kits. There is always a lot of 'noise' about how important it is to have a kit to win or only kits can win. Which allows Wright Stuff to be attacked, unfortunately. Subjectively I don't believe that to be true. Obviously the first place plane wasn't a kit.

Note, I DO recognize the value of kits to getting started.

I'd like to have real data to refute the 'noise', can you post where you placed and whether your plane was a kit? At any level of tournament, just post that info too. Maybe add if you started with a kit.

Thanks,

Jeff Anderson
Livonia, MI
This was my first year in Wright Stuff, but I had done flying events in the past. I started with the kit and the plane I used at nationals was the freedom flight kit plane. It was not built by the instructions, I made changes to it, but the rubber and the prop were from the kit. I placed 4th. I also built my own plane and it used some aspects of the kit but it was very close, in terms of times, to the plane I used at nationals.
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Re: Wright Stuff C

Post by coachchuckaahs »

Jeff:

As noted above, at least first and second this year were not kits.

Looking back, last year I believe Tower Heights was a custom in first, and we were 0.07 sec behind with a custom.

Ohio was won by West Virginia with a custom.

I think the last kit winner was Wisconsin, with FFM.

So it looks like, at least recently, you win with custom.

Chuck

PS: while you asked about WS last year HS was heli. The FFM dominated, it was a good design. However, we won nationals with our own design. There were not many custom designs at nationals from what I saw. The Chinook bonus could not be ignored, and Dave had a pretty good solution. We built at least 10 sets of rotors, and probably 8 bodies.
Last edited by coachchuckaahs on June 5th, 2019, 6:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
Coach, Albuquerque Area Home Schoolers Flying Events
Nationals Results:
2016 C WS 8th place
2018 B WS 2nd place
2018 C Heli Champion
2019 B ELG 3rd place
2019 C WS Champion
AMA Results: 3 AAHS members qualify for US Jr Team in F1D, 4 new youth senior records
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Re: Wright Stuff C

Post by klastyioer »

ig imma join in on this convo
ive been coahced since my first year of doing this to make custom planes
ive only ever tried a kit this year
i still like custom ones more
reason being is because it just feels a lot better to be able to know the quality of your build because you chose everything that goes into it
also ngl they look a lot cooler
but aside from that point, with years unlike this, like last year for instance, itd be so much nicer to have props you can make to fit the rule and parts to make for the rubber rule they had, i dont remember what it was lol
also hook to hook is a thing, makes it a LOT easier to customize that w custom kits
sure at times they may cost more
or less depending on what u do
but theyre fully customized by you
it leaves a lot of room for error but if you know what ur doing its a good opportunity to make some planes on your own
i did try the ff kit this year and my initial thoughts are its pretty good
the only things i dont like about it is the cf and the crazy light wood
oh and the tiny rudder+wingtips are low key annoying bc ofthe whole dutch roll is common in this kit thing
but other than that its pretty good
i just feel like theres so much more room to play around in a custom plane than a kit
though kits are a nice starter to new comers
idk who said this but someone mentinoed better schools using kits or something
my stance on that is they should just build their own! theyre too good to be using starters!
it's not about the medals; go out there and have fun. make progress, learn a few things and have one heck of a time; that's all that matters.

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Re: Wright Stuff C

Post by sciencegirl03 »

newflight wrote:
bjt4888 wrote:Northville and Ann Arbor Pioneer,

Congratulations to both of your Wright Stuff teams on the great flying and great overall team results. You both represented the state of Michigan well.

Brian T
Thanks, Brian! on the tournament day. because of the air drifting, our first plane kept drifting and almost hit on the side net, but fortunately, it stopped around 3 ft away from the net, the fist flight got 3'49. for the second flight, we learned to launch it from a better location but lowered initial launch torque a little bit, second flight ended up at 3:55, it probably could go above 4 if the initial launch torque is a little higher, but we were happy about the results, we got close to our best
Thanks Bjt,
It was an amazing facility- optimal for flying. It was great to see our plane go 3:55!
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." - Winston Churchill

2019 Nationals:
Wright Stuff: 3rd
Protein Modeling: 4th
Geologic Mapping: 5th
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