Our cub has a winch / retreiver setup which works very well for us. The winch is well maintained and equipped with Real Balls which means strong. The club is mainly a power club and I have taken on the task of promoting soaring. Well, when a newguy comes out to learn the winch with his Gentle Lady, there is a good possibility that the STRONG winch will rekit the plane. I take pains to have others actually pedal up the plane etc. and so far learning has been without too much carnage - some poor listeners / macho types have learned the hard way. I have been searching for better ways to teach so I tried an experiment this weekend - I made a cable with a 6V battery in it to go in the footswitch cable (to operate the 12V solenoids) and switched to a 6V motor battery. This worked very well to lower the winch power / speed by about a factor of four (guess). Boy you should have seen me try to launch my Polaris the first time! Groan! The delicate planes were launching well and much more slowly. Since we use 6V motor batteries it is pretty quick to plug in the special cable and switch one motor cable to depower the winch. I expect to use this approach again soon to teach new guys to pedal and throw in the beginning. When they are comfortable, we can switch and I can warn each and every one to tap / pedal a whole lot less for a few launches until they get used to the normal winch. This two step approach may have some merit and I will report on further results / experiences. So far a few guinea pigs liked it and were successful.
Another thought came to mind - for a Gentle Lady type of contest maybe make everyone launch with a wimpy winch. Sort of level the playing field between the strong planes and the more delicate floaters. Of course, being an electrical circuit designer, I really wanted to build a switching controller with a torque dial (current limit controller) but the power FETs and heatsink for a motor of this size would cost in the hundreds! So I went for cheap. BTW Polaris and Image still had a good day even with a wimpy winch and yes, I am not an old time sailplaner. I have never seen a 6V winch. Lets hear it for 12V and The WinchDoc! Hope you all had a good weekend, Jim MacLean ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off.
