Aerobatics your preference?  Love to watch?  Do you wish to get involved in high level aerobatic competitions like IMAC?  Extreme 3D? Many of our members are into aerobatic flying.  From small foamie models to giant scale gasoline powered scale models.  Starting off with a 60 size aerobatic model is the normal jumping in point.

Sixty size are not too expensive and can be glow or electric powered.  Practising manouevres will always be a little terrifying at first and there will be heart-stopping moments and possible crashes.  You have to expect it at some time of other!

Inverted flight, stall turns, inside and outside loops, snap rolls, flat spins and much more are very eyecatching and great fun to watch and achieve.  The aerobatic models are designed to withstand high G forces and with wings generally centrally mounted and large control surfaces, the manouevres are easier to achieve and helped with power to weight ratios much more than standard sport models.

Many of our members own these aerobatic models, some are scale versions of the full size aircraft and powered by powerful electric brushless motors, large glow motors and top of the shop two stroke petrol single and twin cylinder power too.  Petrol power starts from a meagre 20cc, 50cc up to 150cc and beyond although at present the 170 twin is tops at our club.

Members with large scale gas powered models enter into competitions such as the ever increasing popular IMAC competitions.  The latter are precise aerobatic flght patterns but also include freestyle flying which is done to music if you so wish.  There are multiple judges in IMAC awarding or deducting points on all manouevres after take-off.

Or for weekend sport flyers you can gain much pleasure from just throwing it around the sky for fun and adrenalin rush!

After many years of procrastinating I'm finally building a Phase 5. Designed in 1978 this model is often considered to be Chris Foss's (CF) best slope model. It was never available as a kit so the only way to get one is to build it yourself. CF is still selling the plans if you fancy one.

The Phase 5 plan calls for a built up wing but I'm deviating from the plan and making one from foam with a balsa skin. A snow day today meant I could make a start. CF does not specify what sections are used for the root or the tip so a bit of guesswork and internet trawling resulted in the semi-symmetrical E374 for the root, modified a little to make it thinner. The tip is fully symmetrical and is between NACA 0010 and 0011. It's actually 10.67% thick so maybe it's NACA 0010.67?

My 5 year old Super Chipmunk "Pennzoil" from Apache Aviation now supplied by SLEC had always had an ASP180FS up front.  Beautiful sound but I now feel that the model really needed something more substantial power wise.  The ASP180 should be producing around 2.6 hp when tweaked and tuned and I have to say I have tried many props on this motor and never felt really happy.  Plus the fact that the glow fuel residue inside the cowl would slowly weep out and eat the "so called" fuel proof paint on the cowl.  But what could I replace it with. DLE30 or DLE35RA or OS GT33?  After much deliberation I went for the OS GT33.  Coing close to four horse power from this tidy gas engine.  However, the conversion to petrol was not as simple as imagined!