Building the WORLDS FASTEST Foam RC Jet!

in this video you'll see what happened when I took an RC plane and upgraded it to see how fast I could get it to fly through adding bigger batteries changing its aerodynamics and adding a powerful rocket boost that could be activated at the flick of a switch if you've been watching the channel for a while you'll know I've built a couple of rocket-powered planes before but this time I wanted to try something a bit different thanks to my patreon supporters I got myself an off-the-shelf model jet powered by a small internal electric ducted fan although only designed for speeds around 50 miles an hour I believe that this airplane with some extreme modifications could actually beat some of the fastest foam RC jets out there and maybe even beat the very fastest which claimed to fly at an eye-watering 140 miles an hour so why did I think that this plane had that potential well first of all it's very small and lightweight and also very aerodynamic so through making it much more powerful it should be able to reach some higher speeds I've never successfully flown a plane faster than 100 114 miles an hour so my goals for this project would be twofold one I wanted to set a new personal AirSpeed record of over 114 miles an hour and two I wanted to make this plane the fastest foam jet in the world yeah this is a quite an ambitious project so how would I make this airplane fly 140 miles an hour I thought I could modify the electric powertrain of the jet to get it up to a speed of around 100 miles an hour then I could kick in a solid rocket booster to boost the plane to speeds hopefully over that 140 miles an hour Target would I be able to do this or would this all be much harder than I originally thought [Music] 33 completely stocked to see what its out of the box speed would be so that we'd have a benchmark I chose the t-33 for its small frontal area and 80 millimeter wingspan as it made for a great starting point with it being very aerodynamic the problem though was that this plane comes with a very underpowered fan which is only 50 millimeters across meaning to move air quick enough to get this plane flying pretty fast it would have to spin around very quickly indeed but with the recommended battery it wouldn't produce much thrust I could find a way to use a higher voltage battery later on to give the fan a few more beans but for now I just wanted to fly the plane as its makers intended to see what we were working with right clocks away okay feels a bit nose heavy but yes it's up in the air look at that let's go for a low pass here Full Throttle and see what it can do all right I'm not sure how fast that was but uh we'll try again I really don't want to bend this because I've only got one Jet and it could all go wrong at a moment's notice I don't know I mean I'm thinking that's probably about 40 miles an hour so we've got a bit of a way to go I'm a bit out of practice with flying planes like this okay I'll probably land it before I do something silly so uh tap let's come in for a landing oh it didn't feel particularly fast but let's see how fast it actually was with the GPS at 90 kilometers an hour so what's that about 50 miles an hour I think got a bit of a way to go so that's the Benchmark now back to the workshop to do some upgrades the problem that I needed to solve first was how to get the most out of that 50 millimeter fan as previously mentioned the recommended battery for this plane which was a three cell 11.1 Lithium Polymer pack couldn't really get the most out of this motor which could handle up to 16 or 17 volts the issue with using a more powerful battery though was that the electronic speed controller supplied with the t-33 was absolutely tiny this thing regulates how much power gets sent to the motor and if it's too small it could actually set on fire if there's too much current being drawn I thought it would be safer to use a much larger speed controller now I could test the motor at Full Throttle for an extended period of time to see if any of the electronics got hot with the ducted fan helpfully the airflow goes directly over the cam of the motor which helps to keep it cool that feels acceptable so it looks like we can keep this on Full Throttle for two or three minutes without it melting so the next problem was how to keep the plane nice and stable while traveling at higher and higher speeds this plane is fitted with a gyro which is an electronic component that helps to keep an RC aircraft nice and stable when switched on it works by using accelerometers to detect the angle of the plane and automatically adjust the control surfaces to force the plane into a nice neutral straight and level attitude I reassembled the t33 with one of these Gyros installed and then headed out for a second test flight thank you the stabilization system functioned well automatically compensating for this slightly turbulent Air at higher altitudes now to bring it in for a safe landing and check the GPS yeah let's see what the speed was this time 137 so it's uh quite an improvement okay it's finally time to do something a bit more drastic with the airplane I was thinking originally to get the thrust line of the rocket engines correct to put the motors inside where the exhaust tube for the EDF is I was thinking about moving the EDF onto the wing or maybe having like two of them on the wings either side but I think for this project it would be a lot simpler if I just remove the vertical stabilizer here and put the engines sort of like that obviously I'm going to need to take the center of gravity into account with having heavy rocket engines on the end of here and also they're going to burn their fuel and get lighter over time so I need to make sure that that's stability margin is correct also I've got some quite large Motors that I want to test on this airplane so it needs to be able to handle a range of different sizes and a range of different masses of these motors so that's going to affect the CG as well I began by removing the old vertical stabilizer and cut out two new twin stabilizers from foam board which is a favorite material of mine for building model aircraft I made sure that these Services had a similar area to the old single vertical stabilizer to provide a similar amount of directional stability on the your axis the next problem was how to keep this thing visible in the sky as it rapidly travels away from me standing on the ground this meant that it was time to break out my favorite orange spray paint and give the entire airframe a few decent bright coats hopefully chuckiego would approve now I got my attention to how I'd ignite a rocket engine remotely mid-air this would be done through using a second electronic speed controller hooked up to a second battery this was wired up so that it would dump power directly into an electronic rocket engine igniter at the flick of a switch on my transmitter whoa yes that works I hope this doesn't set the fire alarm off but what's about the rocket engines where would I get those from and how powerful would they be well as you might already know model rocket engines are readily available for purchase for the hobby of model rocketry they burn a solid propellant and come in a range of sizes and power ratings I chose two to use on the next couple of test flights the first one was a d size engine made by Estes with a two second burn time and no ejection charge for a parachute or anything the second engine I chose to use was an F size engine made by tsp which has about four times the power of the smaller Esters engine with a similar burn time and also doesn't have an ejection charge or anything like that for a parachute I needed to make a motor mount that would fit the two engines and decided that the easiest and lightest solution was to probably just use an old cardboard tube which was very DIY so I just cut that to size and then designed and printed an aerodynamic nose cone to go on the end on my CAD software on my computer and then printed it on one of my old Ender 3 3D printers then I could glue this onto the tube and then glue the whole assembly securely with a little guide vein onto the rear of the plane being super super careful to ensure that its angle was Bob on however through mounting the engine on top of the airframe in this particular location I'd be introducing another prop problem if the center of thrust is too high on an airplane it can cause the aircraft to pitch down this is because the center of thrust will be above the center of gravity which is the point of rotation on the airplane the higher the center of thrust above the center of gravity the more pronounced this effect will be to counter these effects though the engine can be rotated downwards to push through the center of gravity so we've got a few degrees of down sort of angle on the engine so that the thrust line will be pointing downwards whether this would work and how dramatic this pitch down might be if it didn't work I'd only find out through my next test flight now on the home stretch I just needed to finish up the wiring and installing the ignition system in place and then fine tune the center of gravity range on the aircraft to make sure that this plane would still fly when the fuel had run out which would shift the center of gravity further towards the nose right time for some rocket-powered test flights but before driving up to the Flying Field it's time for a very quick ad from PayPal honey honey automatically searches thousands of websites online for promo codes this little button at the top of your browser is the number one shopping tool in America it probably works on all of your favorite websites that you already use so this is a great free add-on to add to your web browser so that you can make savings on stuff that you already buy if I were to go onto an online store to buy parts for my projects honey would automatically look for coupons it's a nice feeling when you save money so yeah go and get it Go and download it for free you can add it to your browser for free at joinhoney.com project air all right we're actually going out the car park now so I'm going to put the camera away right let's go to the Flying Field when I got to the Flying Field the weather had taken a bit of a foul turn it's a bit Breezy and it's extremely cold today but it's the best day that we had this over the next couple of weeks really the first test flight is just with the EDF alone not with any of the rocket engines because I want to test the aerodynamics I've changed the tail I uh I've also removed the canopy so yes we want to see if anything goes awry with the airplane just as is [Applause] okay so we're up in the air and uh yes we'll just do a couple of high speed runs just to see what top speed is [Applause] okay coming in for a landing foreign Direction seemed to change at the last minute so uh I'm just going to come around again did you see that I had to run out of the way of it right let's see what the speed was so they didn't feel very fast but I was going into the wind so 106 so that's yeah it's not hardly anything only 106 kilometers an hour there so that's about 60 something miles an hour so yeah it's not very not very good but I couldn't really get it lined up into the wind next it was time to install the smaller of the two rocket engines the d-size engine and then try my best to install the igniters with practically frozen fingers very cold obviously we've got the engine up high here as we've discussed previously not really sure how much the uh the aircraft is going to pitch down when I kick in the end the rocket engine so that's one thing that could go wrong another thing that could go wrong is the structural Integrity of the airplane this plane is actually made of foam and if it starts twisting will it disintegrate not sure but that's what this test is all about what we learned from this will go into the next airplane foreign [Applause] turn the nose around and I'm going to engage the Rocket Center so let's see if I can pull that nose round one fire I think we lost the engine just there the rocket engine seemed to eject itself that definitely seemed to give us a bit of a boost let's bring it in for a landing and we'll see how fast it went feels very nose heavy now because he's lost the engine okay bring it in I'm gonna have to keep the airspeed up oh oh dear let's see what's uh what the speed was 142 what's that then it's about 90 miles an hour or something like that not quite 100 yet though so that worked very well I think we got it on camera which is the main thing the engine ejected from the back of the aircraft the plane became very very heavy all of a sudden I don't know why it's ejected because it doesn't have an ejection charge on this particular d-sized rocket engine that we were using apart from Landing in a load of poo over there from the manure on the field that was a completely successful Mission when the plane did uh engage that engine it did nose down a bit but I think the uh I didn't really do anything the the plane corrected itself yeah that gives me hope that the bigger engine is is also going to be fine so uh yeah let's let's crack on with it next up was the largest rocket engine the F size which was about four times as powerful as the previous D size engine tally hope the plane's so heavy now it is having a hard time actually staying Airborne uh and getting enough air speed I didn't want to use up too much of my battery having to use Full Throttle to Simply keep the plane in the air so immediately I lined up for a high speed run going up the ground speed coming across and then three two one fire soon three two one fire this round again oh I think the engine just fell out again so I'm gonna try and bring it home it's going to be extremely nose heavy now so I'm gonna have to bring it in for a very high speed Landing to avoid stalling coming in whoa Oh yay yes we did it oh we've landed in some more poo engine has completely disappeared 211 kilometers an hour 211 kilometers an hour right so we didn't quite crack that 140 miles an hour barrier that time but with a few more modifications I think that this plane has more than enough capability to go through that speed barrier and go a bit faster than that even interestingly this gyro wobbling problem was very similar to the problem that we saw with my mark one jet car from last year where the car got into a bit of an oscillation it's about 70 miles an hour through trying to over correct itself from one way to another so this was very similar although with the airplane it was on the roll axis so next is to tune the gyro and yeah sort that out also a few things that held me back on that flight were you know uh easy things to fix such as the drag from the camera that was on the wing I didn't quite get time to build a sort of Aero pod for that camera or use or get a smaller camera and use that instead but I think next time I'll be able to sort of bury that camera into the wing or something to that effect so we can reduce some drag and you know if I hadn't actually got a camera on there if I wasn't filming this perhaps we would have gone nine miles an hour faster and yeah hit that 140 miles an hour Target so I'm not done yet if you've been following me on Instagram then you'll probably know that I've started work on my biggest project for this year probably are probably the biggest project for this year which is my version 2 jet car this is a super ambitious build and I've yeah really gone to town with the design it's going to be built out of all sorts of things which are a bit expensive so thanks again to you patreons for helping me to to yeah to fund that project if you'd like to support me and to help fund those kind of projects those bigger Builds on this project air YouTube channel then click the link in the description thanks again to honey for sponsoring this video and I'll see all of you lots on the next one here's another video for you to watch in the meantime see you on the next one cheers

Channel: ProjectAir

Views: 2,197,517

Keywords: James Whomsley, whomsley, James, projectair, 3d printing, rc, r/c, airplane

Id: EVPKj91hEcY

Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 24 2023