FT Mini Guinea 1.1

[flitetest]

flitetest submitted a new resource:

FT Mini Guinea - Flite Test Mini Guinea Free Plans

FT Mini Guinea

Designed By: Peter Sripol
Plans By: Dan Sponholz

View attachment 180311​

Description:
The FT Mini Guinea is a small twin with a big personality. Now made with Master Foam this plane offers so much versatility it is insane! Whether you are a beginner looking to build your first twin or you are an advanced pilot looking for a very small and versatile platform, the Mini Guinea can do it all! Using differential...

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[skair_kro]

Great build!

 

[indydronepics]

First one I did and now I'm hooked

 

[CapnBry]

I built one of these with a 20 minute quick paint job to sort of mimic a US Coast Guard C-130 Hercules

Don't mind the buckled nose, the maiden lasted all of 20 second before my original 4-year old EMAX 12A ESC cut out in one wing and I spun into the ground before I could figure out what went wrong. Put two new ESCs in and painted it up and it flies great. Tons of control to do tricks and even slow rolls aren't sketchy. The rudder does couple quite a bit into the roll axis though so I'll probably experiment with disabling the rudder and just using differential thrust. CG was right on the back of the ESC hole cutouts in the wing and was absolutely perfect for gentle stalls with almost no nose drop.

• 2x DYS Samguk 2206 2400KV motors - Left over from my first quad build, these motors are ok but the shafts bend so easily they are not really quad material.
• 2x 5x3.5 biblade counterrotating props. Each makes about 400g of thrust at 12A, although a 5x4 might be a better fit to get a little more speed at 50% throttle.
• 2x FlyColor Francy 30A ESC (with 3A BECs) BLHeli_32 and an LED which shines out the bottom of the wing, fancy? No, francy!
• 4x 9g SG90 knockoff servos
• FlySky FS-iA6B receiver paired with a multiprotocol module
• 3S 1300mAh battery gets me about 9 minutes of fly time despite being a pretty old battery
• 350g dry weight, 460g with battery

The thing that surprised me the most was how long it flew on a battery. I thought I'd need really high throttle to have enough speed to stay up, since the 3.5" pitch is not super aggressive, but I flew around 55-60% throttle which is around 3A per motor. Instead of just murdering the battery in 5 minutes I can fly 9 or 10 doing tricks so I guess the setup is pretty efficient for a two motor build. With the two motors it can almost sort of hover too, although I do not have enough throws to hold it in place.

The only unpleasant thing I experienced is that it takes a while to pick up speed to pull out of a hammerhead stall. The pitch just sort of gets really mushy and ineffective. I could probably improve that with some larger throw on the elevator but I think I have plenty already. Just something to watch out for and make sure you've got a little extra altitude when performing a move where you come to a stop.

All in all a really nice model that is a lot more agile and fun than I expected.