Practice

Well its been a few days of practice, and finding the best and worst sites to practice at! Some late nights and some early mornings. Finally a little bit of a let up to do a blog update.

Official practice and model processing starts tomorrow for some teams, we are slotted for official practice Sat. morning just after the French team. From there we will get our models processed and probably head out for some practice before making our way back to the opening ceremonies.

We first spent a day of practice at the Esperenza where there were the following teams: Ecuador, UK, Columbia, Norway, Sweden.

John Harrop (I hope I got it right) of the UK team is flying this Plettenberg powered Integral.

Kevin Caton from the UK is flying this Pletty powered Twister.

A bit of a crowd watches me practice at Esperenza, unfortunately I wasn't putting on a good show in my opinion!

So far electrics are definitely not dead. From what I have seen at the practice fields they are far more common than glow powered models. We all know that at least half of the top 10 will be running glow, but I personally predict (based on what I see walking through the hotel lobby and the practice sites) that at least 50% of the models here are electrics. I will also go out on a limb and say that Flightpower and Hacker are far and wide the dominating power source of these models, with YS leading the glow models.

After Esperenza we decided to go on a longer drive to find some isolation. We headed down to San Lorenzo which is some 120km away from Santa Fe. There we found no one to fly with except ourselves! I personally got in 8 flights and I think I managed to rid myself of some poor habits that I had been exhibiting at the previous practice sessions.

Our fellow Canadian drivers zooming down the highway toward San Lorenzo at 130kph (the normal speed limit)






San Lorenzo was not a bad field, same orientation as the Worlds site which is nice. Right alongside a highway with traffic that liked to honk its horn as it drove by, some what distracting, but at least we were alone with a lot of opportunity to fly.

The Canadian team prepares for a day of practice at the San Lorenzo field.

Dave Reaville's caller Mark Byrne takes a ride on Dave's Twister in Argentina....look ma no hands!





Today we hit the Galvez field, in the same direction as San Lorenzo but about half the distance. It is also a nice field with the locals welcoming us with a cooler full of cold drinks! We spent part of the day practicing with the Italians and the Portuguese.

The lineup of pilots at the Galvez practice site

The counter-rotating prop arrangement on Sebastiano Silvestri's Angel Evo S. He did not fly the model but said in calm weather it works very well, however in the wind it does not have the speed. The props were very large (I could not see a size). The gearbox is built into the front of the Hacker motor, with dual shafts (one within the other) driving the props. It seems like a very complicated setup with a lot of potential failure points from my perspective.

We ended up getting rained out of Galvez and went back to town to catch up on some errands that needed to be ran. Tomorrow we are heading out bright and early to beat the rush while a number of teams should still be at the site dealing with model processing.

Off to bed!

Chad