Wednesday, February 16, 2011

interview


Finally got around to watching my interview from the worlds. Knowing full well that i'm a pretty rough looking bloke I was putting off watching at it in the name of self esteem, but now I've seen it and i think the worlds media team really did a great job so i thought I should share it. The particular 'some guy' mentioned I think was Bill Olsen (with probably the nicest paint in the fleet) - don't think we'd met at that stage.
cheers

5 comments:

RobG said...

Hey Nick, good interview. Love the weed cleaner guys in the background - shifting a ton of weed with a rake, shovel and wheelbarrow can't have been fun.

I want to extend my flap to be wider in the middle section to hopefully handle chop better, I'm sick of serial crashes going downwind in Waterloo Bay chop. Any ideas on how to go about it?

nick flutter said...

Rob, it's not a bad idea. You would pretty much have to build a new flap, which we can do. You could cut the foil horizontal so the hinge occurs further forward, and maybe introduce some taper in the trailing edge.

However, a bigger flap does this- it increases / decreases the lift more for a given amount of deflection. You could try getting your current flap to deflect more for a particular wand position - ie increase the grearing. So before we cut, could you try that? It means lengthening that bolt at the wand end, or otherwise shortening the one on the top of the bell crank. Try extending the bolt by like 25% and see if that helps.

Also re-doing the sikaflex to help the flap move might be good, we can do that easily- I have the sika and the primer.

When you do increase the flap movement, listen out for signs of it stalling out either before takeoff or at speed with the flap up. If the little flap still isn't producing enough lift with faster gearing and a greater range of movement, and just stalls, then you might want to do a bigger flap

N

Karl said...

Looking at film it appears the hotshots are flying low in the big breeze, lowering the ride height and then turning the gearing way DOWN in chop to prevent bobbing up and down over each wave. Which is probably faster than turning the gearing up and riding the bucking bronco over all the speedbumps downwind. Is this true?

nick flutter said...

Yeah not sure karl! Possibly, I didn't really ask. Sorry I don't know the answer to that.

I shortened the wand in those conditions, which turned on the bronco effect from memory, didnt have gearing as a separate adjustment. The top Mach 2s looked very smooth, no doubt about it.

Karl said...

When you look at any of those top guys in that chop they are flying pretty low. Maybe they are using the geared wand pushrod mechanism to keep some gearing with the wand running at such a shallow angle, but in general they aren't bouncing around much. The system is only stable within a narrow range of pitch, but aggressive gearing can often be the cause of big changes in pitch, so dialing the gearing down seems like a good thing to try. I was headed that way with my own setup until I changed it all again...another new trunk going in.