Jet Engine RC Car - FIRST RUN!

I'm trying to build the fastest possible RC car using a real working jet engine and in this video you'll see what happens when I run it at speed for the first time I'll also show you how I experimented with different surfaces to run the car on what I learned from the first day of testing and even what happened when I put the jet car up against a jet powered go-kart to see which was fastest in the previous video I showed you how I spent three months building this new car that's powered by a small gas turbine usually found in 300 mile an hour model Jets as you might be able to imagine I was dying to get this thing onto a track so I could tune it up and get it ready for having a crack at the official jet-powered RC speed record the official speed record for an RC car sits at a slightly terrifying 219 miles an hour set by this electric RC car built by David buckling from scorched Parts but the official record for a jet powered car as there haven't been many built is only currently at 93.2 miles an hour so this is first record that this car will aim to smash now you might be wondering where on Earth am I going to be running a 200 mile an hour plus model car well last year I used a big Runway but there are a few problems with using a hard surface like a Runway or a race track and that is that you also need some of these which are rubber tires or foam tires and these tires have a big downsize and that is that they are expandable and that means that over a certain speed they can explode and that's not good so this got me thinking about alternative surfaces that don't need tires what if I just use a solid metal wheel you know it would just rotate to however many RPMs and never explode that would be pretty good wouldn't it so that's why back in February I was thinking about using a beach as a test venue so I found a big open beach and took a standard armor Limitless with some standard rubber tires just to see how stable it seemed to be and if there are any drawbacks to using in you know a Big Sandy surface as a track although the car actually ran very stably indeed the sand was nowhere nearly as adhesive as a road surface making accelerating turning and stopping rather interesting there were some more practical issues too the sand got absolutely everywhere which wasn't so great for the small Precision Parts on these cars the salt water was also as you'd expect highly corrosive this surely wouldn't be good news for a jet engine so a beach wasn't going to work so next I started to design a wheel which would survive over 200 miles an hour but I wouldn't need these wheels for the car's first day of testing meaning I got to work on finishing it up for some sub 100 mile an hour runs at the local race track I still needed to make an aluminum engine cover and this was just folded and curved by hand and it turned out pretty well in the end then I 3D printed the aerodynamic nose which also forms some of the intake I had to print this in sections as my 3D printer wasn't quite big enough nice and light actually that but all I had to do was super glue and epoxy it together and it turned out super strong I also had to set up the suspension making it a lot firmer than the stock suspension parts and I did this by locking out the shocks with some plastic 3D printed Parts which have a tiny amount of give but really firm everything up and then I set the angles of the wheels with the correct toe in and toe out for maximum straight line stability this was all quite a lot of work but finally I had a completed car that was raring to go but as you could imagine I was quite nervous after all of this would the car perform as expected or would something Mission critical send me right back to the drawing board I got the car packed up for the big first day of testing but before setting off to the track with all my gear I had to make sure I'd bring something along for lunch and that is where the sponsor of this week's video comes in ag1 you'll probably know already that it's important to get enough nutrition throughout the day and ag-1 is a daily foundational nutrition supplement that supports whole body Health while we have a degree of individuality our bodies rely on the same nutrient Foundation to nourish the systems that power our health this stuff is really quick to prepare and also it really tastes quite nice jinjin ag1 also contains biotin zinc and other nutrients to help support healthy skin hair and nails and it also contains a broad spectrum of micronutrients and phytonutrients to keep the body nourished all day every day so you can have ag1 effortlessly as a daily habit every day at lunch and you only need one scoop or travel packet and eight ounces of water and that's it so go to drink ag1.com project air to get started on your order right with all that covered thank you very much to ag1 for sponsoring this video and now to the track [Music] the day's plan is to sort of start off slowly and build up the speed incrementally seeing how it steers at first how how stable it feels at low speeds and then seeing how stable it feels pushing the speed envelope further and further into the unknown the track was quite long but only so wide which would limit top speed we could hit but I still wanted to see what I could do in the driving space available and get some driving practice in also at the racetrack I was joined by my friend Rich from the YouTube channel major havoc and he brought along his jet powered go-kart which looked quite fast and also quite scary essentially I just started off with a go-kart chassis and yeah put this engine mount through the back it's a swin 400 turbine so it makes about 40 kilograms of thrust I think it actually works out to about 170 breaker horsepower as well so it's got some safety features where I can quickly switch the engine off I couldn't find a brake that would fit that was bigger so I had to kind of make my own we thought that it would be interesting to see who gets the fastest speed over the course of the day right time for the first ever run of the jet car under its own power after doing a range check it was time to get it rolling albeit quite slowly Max reached okay spooling up foreign on this car is so powerful it can push the 12 kilogram car along at idle power so all I had to do was release the brakes a little bit and it would start accelerating I had to be quite careful to stop it accelerating too fast though and keep it under control okay cutting throttle the brakes had worked and nothing was too hot now I can see what would happen if I open the throttle a little bit all right going for the run we're gonna go up to about 10 percent throttle come off the brakes and then we'll try and control it with a stop whoa wow it stops fast that's a good sign yeah great time to check everything over swap batteries refuel before attempting another run but this time slightly faster would the car remain stable at higher speeds though at this point rich took the opportunity to take his go-karts out for a first Speed Run and managed to get up to around 50 miles an hour thank you now it was my turn could I beat Rich's go-kart well I actually tried to take it easy initially but this car just didn't want to go slowly [Music] hold on [Music] great that was a good one let's see uh how fast it went I suppose 82 kilometers an hour so that's about 50 miles an hour uh wait hang on how fast were we supposed to be going I can't remember is it 30. I think I went a bit beyond that so I'd slightly over egged it by keeping the throttle on a fraction longer than I planned to travel on Rails and I didn't actually realize I was going that much faster now to see if we could repeat the Run going back up the track trying to hit a similar speed don't make a mess of it okay engine off all clear hey 100 Bob on 100 kilometers an hour two miles an hour the car was so easy to drive the large rear fins which were starting to work as the speeds crept upwards rich now did a run where he hit 64 miles an hour just about beating my highest speed so far thank you everything was looking good with my RC jet car so naturally I had to try and beat Rich's speed on the next run I really didn't want to bend the car at this stage as at higher and higher speeds the track was feeling narrower and narrower but on the flip side I had the confidence that this thing would remain as straight as an arrow I revved the engine up with slightly more throttle on the start line came off the brakes and as expected the car made a great pass [Applause] [Music] it felt very very stable so that's really good news just like as soon as the speed picked up it was just wanting to stay on the right on Rails I think we've got a really good car here I think there's a really good chassis we just need to figure out a few small things just bulletproof a few things but going to a wider track I think this thing is going to be quite the formidable opponent so that was 70 miles an hour so I'd beaten Rich's top speed rich is very kindly now said that I can have a go on his jet cart he's very brave well it'll be good practice if I ever build one of these foreign kilometers an hour it got a bit wobbly which was a little worrying I didn't really want to push it that much faster [Music] big props to Rich for pushing it to 104 kilometers an hour let's see if we can get rich to 10 000 subscribers as he really deserves it for that hair-raising run and yeah I think you'd enjoy the content on his channel if you also enjoy these kind of videos on Project air so next up in this project with the jet powered RC car is to get it ready for the speed record event where we will hopefully be able to smash the jet powered car RC record I'm not sure how far we'll get but we'll really try and push the boat out hopefully we'll be able to get the new wheels made in time but regardless of all of that I'm really confident in the car and I think that these tests in this video have shown that we've got a really stable platform to work with the car works it's stable and now I just need to do some small tweaks like making the electronics a bit more accessible with some new hatches doing some practical things bulletproofing some of the connections just to make sure that we've got redundancies and all of that sort of stuff but there are no serious issues which is great thank you to my patreons again for making all of this possible and to ag1 for sponsoring this video go and check out the link in the description if you want to get your subscription and if you like the content on my channel then go and check out this video next as unlike with this video there's probably something that goes a bit spectacularly wrong in it and uh it's probably quite entertaining so go go and check this one out next and I'll see you there

Channel: ProjectAir

Views: 388,005

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

Id: JMn0blsL6Us

Length: 13min 35sec (815 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 21 2023