Gee-whiz-Bee

This is my Gee-whiz-Bee from Morris Hobbies. It's not exactly a scale model, rather a caricature.

The plane has a profile fuselage and a very thick symmetrical wing. I have only made some small modifications since a dislike using kit as an expensive set of templates. The wing ribs could have been made from lighter and more suitable wood but I kept them anyway. I substituted the lite-ply doublers with ones made of 0.4 mm plywood with a small vertical reinforcement (2 mm plywood) tying landing gear, motor mount and wing together. The motor mount consists of short pieces of the original hard wood motor mounts and some plywood. The speed controller is attached to the fuselage side with Velcro.

The flight pack is contained in the wing. I mounted the two center ribs some 12 cm apart in order to get a battery compartment. The radio equipment is mounted in the wing (4 standard servos, 600 mAh rx pack)

Motor: Plettenberg HP320/25/6

Flight pack: 14 or 16 RC2000

Propeller: 12x5 (best take off) or 12x8 (best overall, but be careful with throttle to avoid flutter)

Wingspan: 132 cm (52")

Length: 111 cm (44")

Wing area: 50 dm² (775 sq. In)

Weight w/o landing gear (including 14 cells): 2500 grams

Amps: a lot (50-55, short bursts)

It took quite a while to get used to this draggy and short-coupled beast. The thick wing and the tall landing gear make a lot of drag.

However, the motor pulls really strong so I figured I could hand launch easily. I tried it and it worked.

I took off the landing gear and the plane transformed. It flies much faster and longer and the best part is that it now has vertical performance.

It will climb vertically a looong time (speck height) and it can take off from a tail sitting position!

I hold it as can be seen on one of the pictures in a near vertical attitude, then I just push the throttle. Immediate lift off!

A lot of "tumbling around aerobatics", vertical take off and some sky rocket zooming usually give me 6 minutes flying time. It can be slowed down to a walking pace, even on a day with little wind. Flying in high wind is no fun, too much power is wasted on just staying close to the field. Turbulence combined with a very tall fuselage makes low level, low speed flying tricky on windy days. The fuselage seems to blank out the downwind wing.

Flying time with landing gear was 5 minutes but with inferior performance.

Landing is easy, just glide it on the belly. I have added some extra balsa pieces in the bottom to make it more durable. No, I didn't think of it when I built the plane, I have learnt it the hard way.