My First Air Cars

I just recently purchased a couple of cheap Radio controllers and receivers and wanted to teach my self about setting up servos, setting limits on channels, fail-safe modes and all the things that are  involved with RC as the basics. I also wanted to teach my brain that when something is going away from me, it steers one way and when its coming to me it steers the other way. Lol. Brain training, like flying inverted CL.

I bought the RC gear as my Lad really wanted to have a go at RC, although I love CL and prefer it to RC. But RC can do a lot lot more than just fly planes, and thats what got me excited about the idea. The other thing is the Cox 049 Surestart motor must be the most malleable, reliable, easy starting, constant running, and well sized engine there is available for powering things  I want to build and some I have in progress.



Anyway, I decided a pair of very simple, easy and quickly built air cars was the answer to learning some stuff. All they need is steering and throttle control. I used OS Carbys as they are quite cheap in Oz and I was able to buy them down the road from my local hobby store who had them in stock. I have several Cox ones on order and they should be here about 3 weeks.  The Surestarts have been very very carefully built for this application. It may sound counter intuitive but to make an engine run at low revs and do so consistently without the revs wobbling around, hunting and popping etc. is as hard as making one go fast. My two surestart engines will both hold around 4000 rpm and I haven't measured the peak. Probably 15 or 16.  I papered the cranks, squared the crank nose off, squared the back of the crank case off, squared the top of the crankcase off, used a metal reed very deliberately, squared the Cox plug adapter off, used permatex anaerobic sealant on both sides of the crankcase gasket and also on the threads of the cylinder, cox plug adapter head and standard glow plug threads. Used 5x3 prop, 25,25,50 fuel.

The cars go great!!! my son and I have quite a laugh with streamers on them dog-fighting like combat planes but air-cars instead.

Started building an RC dirt speedway sprint car with a Cox engine and am currently setting up the geared drive train for it.
A hovercraft with a Cox engine is sort of started
And my very favourite project which could take me 18 months is using a Cox Surestart to power the fuel pumps for the propellant and oxidizer for the projects actual engine. :-)
A mate of mine has ordered an RC grand prix road race sidecar model using a surestart with geared drive train and a servo controlled moving weight to replicate the weight distribution changes of the fella in the chair when cornering.

I love flying my Cox TD CL planes, but I also love making dumb stuff of prototype/concept demonstrator quality and the Cox Surestart engines are just perfect for this.

Yabby