POWER UP 4.0 - StealthBomber by QuietFlyer
Hi KidsMakeIt, I have a son age 6 very keen to fly these. A while back I had a couple of PowerUp 2.0's but found they were a bit difficult to control in the air, not easy for him and while he enjoyed making the paper plane, getting it to fly passably is frustrating because with one engine/prop they're a bit underpowered. His classmates are fascinated too.
BTW suggest the kids watch the movie "Paper Planes".
Bought a PowerUp 4.0 with the F22 foam board kit, we flew that solidly for a few days but after repeated stalls and nosedives into the ground the foam board is in a somewhat tragic state, after several gluegun repairs and modifications.
So, as an ex glue-sniffing balsa-and-tissue modeller from long ago, I made this little beastie this morning out of a sheet of 3mm medium balsa, a tube of glue and a few bull-dog clips to act as clamps while it dries. To keep it really simple, all angles are 45 or 90 degrees and on a craft mat kids should be able to build this. Tip-to tip its 29cm, and length is a tad less. Note the wings and fins have been sanded to round the edges off, and the tailing edges are sanded underneath to make an upside-down airfoil, this provides stability instead of having elevators; if you would like details I'll take some more pics.
We had a nice first fly this afternoon out in a big park - a perfect spring afternoon and I can say we had a fair crowd of spectators. To get the CoG right the PowerUp 4.0 needed to be shifted 1cm forward from where its shown in the photo. NB Rubber band acts as a shock absorber during a rough landing.
I can also say the PowerUp4 app is significantly better than the earlier one - it communicates with the plane better, and the PowerUp 4 has some really nice advantages:
With twin counter-rotating props, in level flight there is no torque transmitted back on the plane so no tendency for it to roll one way - all the single-engine ones do. It also uses the twin to props to stabilise the plane laterally as well as steer - so there is also no need for dihedral in the wings - my wing is flat - which makes construction a lot simpler. The PowerUp 4 does dynamically keeps the plane level when flying straight. Steering with this is vastly better than the PowerUp 2.0
Even better, without dihedral, flicking the phone fast left/right this plane will barrel-roll and come back to level flight (you want some height before doing this !)
Full throttle straight & level it climbs gently, then bank left/right gently to do sweeping fast turns (note it will tend to dive in a turn).
With the balsa having thinner sections than foam board, and rounding the edges nicely this thing flies fairly fast and can cope in a light breeze, whereas the paper planes and the foamboard F22 don't handle wind so well.
Now that I have this one sorted we will make some more, as my city is stuck in a COVID lockdown...
