Electric Indoor Masters 2016

[Colin]

Well Saturday 14th Feb saw 4 members of the BAOFs driving up to Bradford for this year's Electric Indoor Masters...

Members of the BlueSky Aeromodellers Old Farts !

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The EIM was not as well attended this year internationally - Andy Symons thought this may have been due to a large international competition coming up in a couple of weeks.

As always though what was there was interesting and the standard of flying put us to shame!

Here is a view of the pits area ...

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Trade support was limited to MT Foamies and Fast Lads - Optipower and FlyingDogs, present at previous shows, were noticable by their absence...

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[Colin]

The complexity of these models always fascinates me.
For example here is the contrarotation mechanism used by a lot of pilots. Simple when you look at it - a drive belt off the motor shaft drives one prop shaft, then a rubber ring on the motor shaft friction drives a wheel on the other prop shaft. Simple - but good engineering required!

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And take a look at the bracing on this model ...

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Some of the models involved heavy milling of the depron such that there was hardly anything left holding it together. As a result the models fly extremely slowly ...

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[Colin]

So on to the flying. The competition consists of a number of classes - F3P-A, B and C, F3P-AM and Freestyle.

For A,B and C fixed sequences of manouvres are flown - C being the 'easiest' through 'B' to the most complex in F3P-A. F3P-AM is 'aeromusical' where pilots fly their own routine to their own mix of music - the idea being to show their aerobatic skills and at the same time artistic skills by linking the flying to the music.

Finally freestyle is an EIM only knockout competition where two pilots compete in against each other in a round, doing improvised flying to music randomly selected just before each flight. The best flight of each round is decided by the audience on the basis of which one is thought to be most entertaining.

There are some videos in the next post showing some of these.

[Colin]

So here's some examples. Apologies for the sound - Youtube took exception to some of the music used on the basis of copywrite - so just hum in the quiet bits! (The music is only important for F3-P AM, Freestyle and the demonstration flight.)

First of all F3P-C - the intro class for F3-P...


Now skipping F3P-B here is one of the top UK flyers, Liam Clayton, flying F3P-A. (Sound doctored by Youtube)


Star of the show has to be Derk van der Brecht from the Netherlands, here flying F3P-AM. Note how his flying is synchronised to the music..


Going back to Liam, here he is flying freestyle, with no advance knowledge of the music. Keep your eyes on what he does with the model! (Here Youtube has let me use the music so long as we have the ads! Sorry...


Finally you may have seen this routine on a previous EIM report but here is Derk doing his party piece. (with more ads )..

[Colin]

Finally there is always a raffle at EIM and we have been reasonably lucky with these and this year was no exception with my winning a new model that Andy Whitehead was demonstrating. Trouble is it is so new there are no instructions at all so I need to get in touch with him to explain a few things !

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Update: I am now in touch with Andy Whitehead so now ordering the bits I need!