Endless Sphere

I was always impressed by this setup at Oshkosh.

Outperforms just bout everything on the field. It is unfortunate that Zero's lawyers made it difficult for the designer to offer it as a ready to go kit.

Where you will place the battery pack? Plan is to locate it where the fuel tank currently resides which is in the forward fuselage between my legs. In previous conversions this is where it has ended up. The wings on the Moni are very thin so there is not a lot of room in the wings. Dude. Why don't ...

You already have the feathering propeller? There are a few out there but I have not had much luck figuring out who makes them to purchase one. I have an idea for how to implement one using existing large scale R/C folding prop blades but want to ensure I can get a usable powerplant with a fixed pro...

But that's like saying I have an awesome method to create gold out of almost nothing! I'll be a millionaire, right? To create a gram of gold, I just start with three grams of diamonds and . . . The plants I work at have neutron flux detectors that slowly turn to gold. But they start out as Platinum...

Well time for a slight update.

Bought a motor and speed controller from here.

Going to take a bit of work to make a reduction drive to adapt it for propeller use.

34 kw SMRE size 14 motor


Sevcon Gen4 350 A

Here are some big ones.

http://www.icare-rc.com/propellers_folding.htm

Biggest one on there is a 34.2" x 22.5" three blade unit.

Folding is nice if the plan is to shut down the engines but just stopping the prop cuts down on drag quite a bit.

It is an aerobatic motorglider rather than a nice clean design. https://imgur.com/OkUHaux It has constraints on propeller diameter with a forward mounted engine so I am thinking that distributed would take care of that rather than having a single really inefficient prop on the nose. And if I go with...

I'm really interesting in how you make out with the distributed propulsion.

Might be a better option for the MONI motorglider I am looking to convert.

Great to see this project flying!

Get some electronic flight bag software and do the same thing. You will need it afterwards anyways.

Fltplan GO is free and there are a few others that are as well. The premium software like Foreflight is better but that is mostly in the UI department.

Simulators are actually really bad at teaching you the stick ad rudder skills needed to fly light aircraft.

They are great once you get to instrument flying but there is nothing that beats the seat of the pants feel for learning to fly.

What kind of performance were you getting out of it?

I'm looking at 20+ Kw for a Moni motorglider. I know they have flown on a 95R but it appears to be pretty marginal.

Pipistrel makes a nice plane.

They are selling them up here in Canada already.

Unfortunately the LSA rules specifically say that an LSA must have a single reciprocating engine. Someone was a bit shortsighted when they wrote that rule.

I thought the guys behind the EMG had a motor planned out.

You could always use a pair of Turnigy rotomax's but be sure to get the voltage up.

It will be interesting to see his in flight power measurements once he adds the instrumentation.

He doesn't have enough power with those engines stock wind. The same ones were used a while back on a Lazair ultralight and they were marginal even after being rewound for more power. The Lazair is a really light aircraft with a huge wing area so it has very low power requirements. It is an interest...

craneplaneguy wrote:So while I had my head down looking at my feet I revved it up to load up the brakes and being a total newbie forgot to hold the stick back.....and up on the nose I went

Stick in your gut no matter what.

That Stratomaster looks good in your panel Farfle.

I would stick with 3d printing for now but I would also find some way to reduce the hardware costs. Modularity is great but if I am paying the full price when I want a smaller module then the value gets lost. I have to say I was totally on board until you opened your store and I saw the retail price...

As far as tooling goes you would decide what size is going to be the most common and make a mold for that. If you make a 6p enclosure the user does not need to install 6 cells if they want a smaller battery. I can tell you right now the price is what kept me away, and I have the 3d printer to make t...

Going back to the injection molding discussion I have very recently turned a 3d printable design into an injection molded product. We did it because as you have found 3d printing is cheap for a prototype but is not capable of scaling up economically. The break even point in cost is around 1000 units...

Finally got to do my first brief ride with this working today. It is shocking just how fast 500 watts will push a road bike. Probably going to tone that down to 200 watts or so to get some decent range. Still need to tweak the mounting a bit. Pushbutton throttle works but the 1000 microfarad cap tak...

I suspect you will be able to push that motor pretty hard with the massive amount of air cooling available.

I have seen it fly on an Earthstar Thundergull which is a much bigger and heavier plane. The Belite is likely half the weight.

The combined airspeed and altimeter were all I ever needed. Getting a low range airspeed indicator is important for aircraft like this since accuracy at the bottom of the scale is more important than at the top of it. The Stratomaster I have (its sitting on a shelf if you are interested in buying it...

The downside of course is that you are always flying around with full tanks as far as W+B goes. It is less of a problem in a single seat plane but I rarely fill the tanks in my Cherokee because it limits what you can carry and slows you down when you don't need it. You have quite a bit going on in t...

It should be OK. However the term "Dry weight" is being with modules removed if need be. Just be careful with "dry weight". Dale Kramer went that way with his electric Lazair (he as going to sell them so ensuring legal compliance was a necessity.) His opinion that the battery was fuel was allowed b...