Member Profile - Don Emmel

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Member Profile - Don Emmel

Postby DonEmmel » Mon Jul 08, 2013 4:24 pm

Where to begin? Do I mention when I started with radio control or radio control aircraft? My father was always a bit of a professional hobbyist. I remember having control-line planes, model rockets, "free flight" drag cars (not sure what else to call it), etc when I was a kid. These were always shared hobbies with my father. Our first actual radio controlled toys came when I was 13 or 14 yrs old. I got the Tamiya Hornet and my dad got the Tamiya Subura Brat a couple of months later. It took me a couple of months to save up for the battery and radio equipment so both cars ended running around the same time. The following Christmas we both upgraded to the Team Associated RC10. Mine had bushings and my dads had full bearings throughout. Very durable cars but not exactly quick. I fiddled with cars for a few years before I started getting bored.

Helicopters have always fascinated me for some reason. I'm not a helicopter geek but something about the engineering of a helicopter always fascinated me. When I saw the Kalt Whisper electric heli back in 1990 I had to have one. They were quite expensive, especially for someone working their way through college. I think it was about $1000 in 1990 money for all the gear needed. I didn't have a clue what I was doing. Pitch gauge? What's that for? CoG? Huh? I followed the directions but guessed for things like blade pitch. I remember it taking forever to get the tail rudder to work correctly. Back then the gyro was mechanical and it was fairly large. I probably "flew" it about a dozen times before I gave up on it. I can only remember ever getting one good hover out of the thing. It got to be too expensive and time consuming so I moth balled it.

Fast forward to about December 2006. Christmas was coming and my wife wanted to know what I wanted. I poked around a few hobby sites and found a 450 sized RTF Walkera helicopter. It was roughly $300 for a RTF electric helicopter that used some new battery technology called lipo. I dumped more money into that thing than I care to admit. It was just too darn sensitve to fly. I don't think I ever got that thing to even hover. Moth balled it. A year or two later I saw one of the new co-ax RTF helis from Esky. It wasn't much more than a toy but it would hover and do forward flight. I fiddled with this for a few months before I got the itch to try the Walkera again. I bought a few parts to fix it and discovered Radd's School of Rotary Flight. It was a simple "How to" online article showing how to learn to hover in roughly ten exercises. The first few were basically exercises that forced you to get your heli set up correctly. I was hovering the Walkera, in my garage, within a week. Cool stuff. The next Christmas I ordered TREX 600, which was a large scarey electric heli. This is the first radio control aircraft I brought to RCMB. A year after the TREX 600 I got into planks with the Tower Trainer MKII. Now I have several planes, helis, and quadcopters....and no money.
DonEmmel
 
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Joined: Sun Jan 29, 2012 9:46 am

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