Today I got the kids all day so my wife could have a "day off". So the kids came with me to the office and to the farm. My 4 year old especially likes to help with a lot of stuff I do, so it made for a fun, but slightly less productive day.

In the end I got 3 FAI practice flights in. I never actually got out of the hover because I was working on the dampening again. I had glued the dampers in last night with a gel epoxy. I was hoping this would make a longer lasting dampening. But instead it basically locked up the dampening and just did not work at all. I spent the first two flights trying to get these glued dampers to work. Finally I gave up and put in some new dampers and the machine was hovering good again for the third flight. I just have to face it that the dampening that I like for my FAI machine is going to wear out over time and I have to replace it every few days. I can revisit this issue after the nationals and see if I can get a long term solution that I like.

At that point we should also have our different durometer damper options. Right now we only have the stock dampers (70 durometer) and I sand the OD to get the hardness I prefer. The 60s might be the best long term solution. But time and flight testing will tell.

FAI ENV - 3

Total Run 2 - 322

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Allright, so now im back after a great weekend in Venlo. Had some trouble with internet connections (Zack;)) and couldnt blog but i will try to mention a few things that happend.

following my last blog from my iphone after wed:

We went back to the flying field at thursday morning and tried to find some Rapicon fuel but ended up buying a gallon of Coolpower, just to test our helis. Had some troubles tuning them, they seemed to be very lean on the high needle and rich on the middle, couldnt really find the sweetspot on any of my machines.
After 3 hours(felt like a whole day) the Rapicon shipment with fuel came in and i refiled my helis and went back out to test some more, finding out that our engines that has been running on Rapicon fuel in Norway worked alot better with that fuel than the Coolpowel, it might have been my tuning, but anyway it turned out good.

Next day was set manouvers day....... pfff.. lets just say i like freestyle alot more than just doing manouvers :D
I saw alot of geat flights and there was some of the mikado guys that really had been training alot, you could tell...
The TT team had some demo slots in the middle of the day and me and Colin took out our X50 for a duoflight, and it sounded like the crowd liked it. found out that i had been digging some dirt with my blades, there were alot of gras on them, cant remember when but thats probalby becouse we had alot of fun flying toghether trying not to hit eachothers helis, this was by far the coolest demo flight i have done with a 50size.
I cant remember if we went out for a drink after this day but we probalby did.

Next day was freestyle day... sweet. the CY team had alot of great pilots there this year, looking at Nicks freestyle was the best, i cant remember last time i saw a flight with so many new manouvers. I found out that there was alot of FBL machines flying around at this event, so it looks like i have to bring mine out for more testing here in Norway....

eat, drink, sleep, charge..... next morning

Didnt get alot of sleep this night becouse there werent any AC in our hotel room, just a big fan that sounded like a 747 taking off, but the good service and great food from the hotel manager and his wife made us forget that very fast.
Before we went out to the 3DM field we stopped by to get some water and stuff for the day and yet again i found out that they didnt take any of my cards, hmmm...
The next few hours went really fast and i was suddenly next up... Had to turn on my iphone to listen to my music a few times before i went out, its been a long time since i mixed it... (or even played it)...
After 45s i found out that i didnt really have a plan on what to fly next so i tried to improvies abit, felt like i was just repeating everything i just flew the whole flight, but finished it, just 15s longer that what i was supposed to fly... found out that my caller was telling me the time through the whole flight but i was probably to focused to hear anything else than the music.
The finals began and all of the pilots really put on a great show.

The final scores for the masters:

1 place: Nick Maxwell
2 place: Daniel Katzav
3 place: Kyle Dahl

congratulations!!!!

to bad Zack didnt get Nicks victory flight on tape, it ended with a boom!!! great flight! ;)

a big thumbs up for the locals they really made this weekend great!

best regards,

- Tom


btw: I will try to upload some pictures soon

As I mentioned we are having major renovations done to our house, new siding, new ACs, and a new deck. Because I have been trying to get out to the field to practice, I have checked in with the construction guys every morning and then leave for the field. I did that yesterday and usually I don't worry as my wife is there and any issues (and there have been some) she calls me and I try to figure it out. Yesterday they were sinking to posts for the deck. I was there for the first part and they were fine, Deborah had a doctors appointment so she was gone most of the morning and then had to leave for a conference in Orlando in the early afternoon so when she never got a chance to look at it. When I got home from the field, the crew was gone and they had set the posts 18 inches too short making the deck 26 1/2 feet instead of 28 feet. I caught them this morning and they had to remove and replace 4 posts, fortunately they hadn't done any other work other than setting the posts so it was a minimum job.
More practice today. I hope to get in 6 flights with 4 being "F" schedule.
Gordie

Another day and not much going on.

Getting ready for IRCHA in 2 weeks, so much to do and so little time. If you haven't been to IRCHA there is simply no bigger helicopter event in the world.

Some really cool stuff planned for the event that's for sure.

Tonight I managed to finally have a good dinner with Steak and Baby Back Ribs, not that anyone cares but hey...it's a blog.

It's been good to take some days off from flying, I feel refreshed and anxious to get flying again and hitting it hard. I think I'll wait till the weekend before I hit the air once again.

By the way, if anyone is looking for some great music you need to check out the new Bullet for My Valentine CD..it rocks!

Well, signing off for today but you can always get more at www.Mike-3D.com

Mike

Today was another FAI practice today. When we were in Venlo and we got a short rain delay, a couple of the judges made the comment that I must not see this a whole lot at home. Meaning Texas is very dry and no rain. Well, for good or bad I live on the east side of Texas and we get plenty of rain. Today was another case in point. I managed to get in two hovering flights before the rain came in. I was just starting my third flight win it started a heavy rain. Quickly we had flood warnings in our area and I was not getting in any more flying.

Hopefully tomorrow will go better with the weather.

FAI ENV - 2

Total Run2 - 319

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I have done 15 flights in the last three days, 11 of them "F" schedule. I have been able to get through them with only a couple of mis-steps on the pull back and even then I got out of it with no problems. I still suck at "F"schedule, but now I don't suck as bad!:D
Congratulations to Ennio Graber for winning the European F3C Championships and the the Italian Team for winning the Team Championship. Having met most of these guys at the World Champs in Muncie last year I can say that they were very impressive. Congrats to Mark and Steve for making the Flyoffs.
We leave for Muncie and the US Nationals Saturday morning, I hope. Flying starts Monday.
Gordie

Today I spent about half the day at the office. Once I got to the farm I spent a descent amount of time unloading all the travel stuff and getting the FAI machine ready to fly again. The machine I launched through the tree at the masters had the motor from my FAI machine in it. So I took it back out and looked it over, it looked fine.

It is now back in the FAI machine. I then went over to the FAI field and setup all the chargers and got the FAI machine ready to fly. I plugged everything in and carried it out to fly. Then I put it into a hover and started walking out to the course. And it started to rain.

I landed it quick and put it under the cover as very hard rain came over. I sat and waited for a while as it got a little lighter rain but just kept raining. Finally I realized I was not going to get in any FAI flying. So I took the little rave and just flew it in the rain to get in my daily rave. It started as a pretty light rain. About 1 minute into the flight it got harder so I started to hide under a tree with the machine still out on the field. Another minute later it started to down poor. I kept the machine in the heavy rain for a little while, but then brought it in under the tree with me, hovering all around under the tree. I finished that flight and did my best to get everything back into my truck without getting things too wet.

Hopefully tomorrow will go better as I need to get in FAI practice.

P.S. I just added the 5 minutes to Venlo video to the 7.22.10 blog. I was not able to upload the video during the trip because of the slow upload speed.

Little Rave - 1
Total Run2 - 317

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Hey Guys,
Sorry for not keeping very up to date on blogs. We arrived home yesterday evening from the trip. The flights home all went well, and luckily no odd cancellations, or any luggage troubles on these flights!

I believe the last blog was after the first day of set maneuvers, so I'll try to pick up from there. Saturday we had the masters Freestyle, and Experts Music/Freestyle. The weather was great, and the helicopters were all running very well! LOTS of good flights were flown. A couple ones that really stood out were Jamie's freestyle, he had the blades in the grass 90% of the time. The main thing that impressed the heck out of me was he flew very low, but consistently low, it was not a typical low flight of, drop low here, higher the next part of the maneuver, then back low, his entire maneuver /flight he was doing was done low. Another one was Chen's flight. He has a really nice flying style of high speed flight with maneuvers at constant speeds, you can tell he is an accomplished FAI pilot as everything is constant speed, and smooth lines incorporated into aggressive 3D maneuvers.

The freestyles ended pretty early, and we were pretty darn hungry so decided to try to find a restaurant other than fast food. That turned into about the funniest thing that happened the entire trip. Traveling internationally, usually something goes wrong in the car directions wise, or wrong thing to do at an odd sign, or something like that, but this might just have to top them all. Jim (Jamie's dad) was driving, and we were just looking for someplace to stop. And down a nice looking little alley there was quite a few places we wanted to look at. So like normal, made a left turn down the "trail". Everything seemed pretty normal, but suddenly we noticed some odd looks from some people standing and walking, and people on bikes. Turns out we had inadvertently turned onto a bikes only trail down the middle of all these shops. So there we are, in a pretty big 4 door car (big for most European cars) driving down this bike trail trying to find a place to eat. After noticing it was a bike trail, instead of a search for food it quickly became a search to get off the bike trail. Finally it turned into a kind of "turn around" and we did a 180 right in front of this coffee shop with all these people outside... "crazy Americans!!!!". Anyways the funniest part was having to retrace our steps, past the same people to get back out. While its wasn't a super long distance we traveled, we had to go pretty slow, so it took a good 3-4 mins to get back out. The whole time, we were laughing our butts off as we back tracked out onto the regular car road. Not much you can do but laugh and get back out.

After that we went back to the hotel to work on models and get ready for the flight to music on Sunday.

Sunday started out nice, but slowly turned pretty rainy near the end of the day. Rained a lot, and got cold. Luckily made it all the way up until the last freestyle flights in the finals before the rain came.

The flights to music all went well, Daniel Katzav flew the absolute best flight to music possible. You could tell he was having fun with the music, and knew how to make the helicopter do exactly what the music did, speed, inputs, and sounds of the heli all were executed right with the music.

The finals pilots were announced, they did some demos and began the finals. The top five were:
1. Kyle Dahl
2. Daniel Katzav
3. Myself
4. Luigi Rungi
5. Dominik Haegele

Daniel flew absolutely phenomenal in the set maneuvers and won those. Placing second in the set maneuvers, all that was left was freestyle finals. Luckily that flight went well for everyone, and that ended the competition flights for the Masters. At this point it started raining pretty gosh darn hard. They were still doing demos, etc. in the rain, and then we started with the awards. Kyle Dahl received the award for the highest scored music flight, and I received the award for the highest scored electric flight. They then started the final placing for all the Experts and Masters. To say the least, I could not be any happier with the results, and feel very honored to have placed first in this years Masters.

Final Placings were:

1. Myself
2. Daniel Katzav
3. Kyle Dahl
4. Luigi Rungi
5. Dominik Haegele
6. Eric Weber
7. Chen Zarfati
8. Jamie Robertson
9. Daniel Jetschin
10. Bas De Groot

Congrats to all the competitors! And thank you to everyone at 3DM! It was a pleasure to meet many new people, and get to spend time with everyone there.

Thanks,
Nick

Today was a travel day back home. So we really just spent the whole day sitting on a plane. We spent a lot of the time talking and rehashing the whole event. It was interesting hearing about the event from everyone's perspective. A lot of little things are always going on behind the scenes.

My daily rave today I ran outside my house today with the little rave. It was dark and raining and I was very tired. But honestly it was nice to get in some flying. I have been watching a ton of flying all weekend and no real time to enjoy flying myself. So even just one short flight was good to get in.

Tomorrow we get back into the full swing of FAI practice. As we have only about 10 days days of practice left.

I would certainly like to follow in Nick's winning ways and get us a Nats win. Time and hard practice will tell.

Little Rave - 1

Total Run2 - 316

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It's been a whole week since I posted, unbelievable. We are having renovations done to our house and it has turned into a nightmare. We had two brand new air conditioners installed, hopefully to lower our utility bills as the old ones were almost twenty years old. The installation went without a hitch and the units ran great. The next day, our contractor was putting up new siding on the rear of the house and one of the nails punched a high pressure line in the wall so the main air conditioner went out. The only ways we can fix it are to rip out the wall or run a new line down the outside and they cannot do either until tomorrow so it has been hot in here for the last three days.
I have been going flying for the last three days and have flown "F" schedule many times now and feel like I can get through the maneuvers pretty well IF I can see the model. I have been flying early in the morning when the model is backlit and I struggle. After the sun goes to the so that it lights the side I am looking at, I am OK. I am getting new prescription sun glasses this week so maybe that will help. When I can see the model, I can get through "F" and even make some corrections.
I just realized last night that I only have two weeks of practice left before we leave for the NATs and Team Trials. I don't think I'll be ready but we'll do what we have to do. I have three sets of batteries but only one set is really good and hard practice may cost me another so we shall see how it turns out.
Congratulations to Nick for his win. I know he is planning on the US F3C Nationals and trying to make the US Team. Go NICK!! I'm rooting for you.
Gordie

It's been a slow weekend, winds been kicking from the tropical depression that passed by but I still manged to get a bunch of flights in.

Since my wife and daughter are in Peru for I've managed to have more downtime then ever before. It's both a good and a bad thing since I hate being in this big house all alone but it is quiet so I get lots done.

Still looking for a job :(

On another note, 3D Masters was this weekend and I wanted to congratulate my friend Nick Maxwell for coming in 1st Place!

This was a well deserved win for a great guy who has really just taken his flying above and beyond what we have all been used to.

Well, it's a short blog today but thanks for reading and be sure to check out www.Mike-3D.com

Mike

Today was the final day of 3D Masters 2010, the 10th anniversary of the event. The morning started off with masters flights to music. Then came the final two rounds for both experts and masters which consisted of the top 5 pilots from the prelimanary rounds. The flying was excellent all day! Unfortunately we had a few rain delays, not only that but it got really cold as well :rolleyes:

The winner of the flights to music round was the current leader Kyle Dahl, with Daniel Katzav 2nd, myself 3rd, and Nick 4th. After a short wait the final 5 pilots that would be advancing to the finals were announced... Going into finals was Kyle Dahl 1st, Daniel Katzav 2nd, Nick 3rd, Luigi Rungi 4th, and Dominik 5th. Unfortunately I did not make the cut, even though I scored really high in both freestyle and flight to music it wasn't enough to bring me back from my poor set maneuvers round. The good thing is that I know what I did wrong and how to fix it, the bad thing is is that a competition as prestigious as the Masters only comes around once a year.

Before the finals began some sponsors of the event had demonstartion flights to present to the very "hungry" crowd as they like to call it. Haha. Tareq was on hand showing off the Outrage 90, he did a really cool demo where he was flying around and between some Outrage RC banners, at one point he even chopped a little piece out of it with the blades :D :eek:
Also another fantastic demo was a tandem between arguably the two best 'smackdown' pilots in the world, Tareq and Lukas :cool:, they were both 'going off' for sure, they were playing with the banners and at one point Lukas was chopping leaves off the tree in the distance. Haha it was quite entertaining! ;)

So after noon demos the finals began, all the pilots were tense and very focused. They first flew set maneuvers, the masters sets were won by Daniel Katzav. Then after the experts were done with sets and freestyle it was time for the masters freestyle... I don't think theres any doubt what the 'highlight' of this event was. I think anyone that was there would tell you it was Nicks final freestyle. WOW!! :eek: :cool:
It was absolutely insane, just watch the vid!! So needless to say he ended up winning that round. So now all there was to do was wait for the final results. At this point in time it had been drizzling for quite awhile and then started raining pretty hard for about 30 or 40 minutes.
Finally the awards presentation began... The winner in the experts class was Gael Lamirand. And the masters results are as follows, Dominik 5th, Luigi Rungi 4th, Kyle Dahl 3rd, Daniel Katzav 2nd, and that only leaves Nick Maxwell as the 2010 3D Master. I think anyone will agree that he really deserved to win, he was doing some maneuvers that I personally have never seen done before. Congrats to him! The last time an American won was none other than Curtis back in 2004, he was judging this year as I'm sure you know from reading his blog.

So after all the anticipation of final results there was only one thing left to do... The famous victory flights! However before the victory flights Curtis did a demo with the newly released Rave ENV. He started out by going to the far right of the field and 'chopping' away at some trees, just when you thought it couldn;t get more interesting, it did... In true Curtis fashion he came blazing down to the other end of the flightline and attempted to go behind a huge tree... Notice I said attempted, you guessed it he totally sent the heli right through the tree :eek:, it was so cool to see the heli come flying out the other side along with branches and leaves and who knows what other stuff was in the tree. Haha!
Then the final highlight of the day was Nick's victory flight. He started off by doing an in flight take off blade stop from right off the ground, then he began doing high speed hurricanes about a foot off the ground... At the far end of the flightline out a little ways is a little thin wire fence that is barely visible, well Nick was going to fast and to low to dodge the fence... Smack!! It was one of the coolest crashes I have ever witnessed! Pieces went flying everywhere! But he was all laughs as he had just won the contest :cool:

This was my first 3DM, and it was a learning experience for sure. I hope to come back next year and hopefully apply what I've learned! It was a fantastic event aside from the rain delays. Overall it was a suuccessful event for the US, with Kyle coming in 3rd and Nick obviously winning :cool:

Tomorrow we get up early and start our trip back home.

Today was the last day at the Masters. So they started with Mastes class flight to music. Then flew the finals Expert complusary and Masters compulsary. Then they followed with expert and masters freestyle. We got quite a bit of rain today that slowed things down, but overall things went ok. We just got very wet while waiting around for the awards, raffle and demo flights.

It was interesting to see who raised their level of flying today to try and move up in the day. Overall the flying was very good again. One error I did see in the flight to music was some people tried flying harder or more aggressive to get higher points. That does not really help in flight to music. The scoring for flight to music really rewards matching the music above everything else. Hard and scary flying often hurts unless it matches the pace and style of the music in some way.

As for the compulsary maneuvers, the errors were really like the first day.

The final results for the masters had Nick in first, Daniel 2nd and Kyle 3rd. Experts ended with Gael Lamirand 1st, Josef Moizes 2nd and Ryou Migita 3rd. As a judge I can say they all flew very well.

For my daily rave flight today I got a demo flight right before the winners demos. That was cool, but the fact that my demo only went about 35 seconds was certainly unplanned. The crowd was shouting to chop the trees so I went down on the right end of the field and flew through the trees a couple of times. I then flew across the field to "try" and go around a big tree on that side. I went around it fast backwards, confident that I had cleared around it. Turns out I missed by a bit, and the machine came shooting out the other side at high speed taking a good part of the tree with it. I have to say I was disappointed to crash that early in the flight, but I also have to say that it was a pretty cool crash. I also got lucky and the machine was not damaged that bad. The blades were even fine. I think I just have to replace the main gear, main shaft,blade grip ball, possibly cross shaft and tail blades. Everything else, even the main frames seem fine. I will take that.

Nick went out for his demo not long after mine and he sifted his championship ENV right through a fence. He said "I had no idea it was there". And it looked like it, he hit it at full speed. Another good crash.

Right now we are all packing to get ready to go home tomorrow morning.

Nitro/Electric ENV - 1

Total Run2 - 315

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Well by the power of the iPhone 4 I can give you my quick perspective on the day . With close on 60 competitors and the experts music and freestyle and masters freestyle today was always going to be long day with a lot of flying. But as with the sets yesterday today showed that practice is really what sorts out the really good from the great pilots. There were some well known pilots who you would expect to put fantastic flights in that fell a little short of the mark and some lesser known pilots that really showed they had every right to be there. This was especially true in experts class where a couple of pilots put in freestyle rounds that would rival many of the masters flights !!

If I was to share one thing with people today it would be slow the routines down a little . A flight isn't about how many tricks a person can do in the time available it's also about how well the tricks are done. So often less really is more. I would prefer to see fewer manoeuvres flown well with nice smooth transitions than a routine jammed full of half finished and poorly executed manoeuvres.

Well that's it for now. More updates tomorrow :-)

Cheers


Chris

Today was the second day of contest flying at the Masters. They flew Experts Flight to music, Masters freestyle and then Experts freestyle.

Overall the flying level was quite high. For both experts and masters the pilots are very impressive. And it is good to note that good pilots are coming from all over the world. Europe, Asia, US, Australia, England and others... It is very good to see.

Judge notes: General notes from the judges chair

1.) On the flight to music the creative interpretation (choreography) was the most important part. Even pilots that may have flown simpler maneuvers often scored well because they matched the music very well.

2.) In the freestyle one of the most important parts was to show good control of the machine at all times, fly aggressive (meaning show solid intent to do a maneuver and give it a good specific form), show new maneuvers or at least new combinations to make regular maneuvers interesting.

3.) With freestyle and flight to music it seems to help to have a good start and good ending to a routine. And by good I mean unique, memorable and controlled.

4.) The most common mistakes I have seen are people flying sided, meaning they keep most of their maneuvers to one side, which is a downgrade. Also in the freestyle some people spent too much time developing a long maneuver (10 seconds or longer). While even doing it well, if you spend too much time on one maneuver it limits the display of your other skills and you get a lower score on things like variety and technical merit. Often you can show the mastery of a specific skill in a shorter time frame and move on to something else to add up more technical and variety points.

5.) Another thing that often reduces pilots scores in flight is if they do maneuvers that the judges have already seen done a bunch of times. Unless you do it almost perfect, you will get a lower score for just not being original and not as high of a technical score because a lot of people are doing it so it is likely not as hard.

6.) One thing that i saw that did help in freestyle was to throw in some of the higher level compulsary maneuvers and add an additional level of difficulty to them. Like extra reversals or reverse from looking at the top of the disk or bottom. That way the judges can tell what you are doing and recognize it is a highly technical maneuver.

I am sure there are more things as well. But I am pretty tired at this point and I cannot think of anything else.

There was a very good turnout at the event today and we had tons of people by the CJYE booth today. I included one photo of just two of the many people that stopped by.

I also took a few photos from the judges chair. Just to let people see what it looks like from that little white tent.

I had to get creative to get in my Daily Rave flight today. I have a photo of it, but again I cannot comment on where I actually flew it.

Little Rave - 1

Total Run2 - 314

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