You can use stock RC gear for the radios, it would be a wiring job and building the mechanical parts job rather than an electronics job. Standard RC ESCs and receivers. Most of the work I expect would be the mechanical end. My RC helicopters have brushless motors that produce up to 7 horsepower, but they spin quite fast and are geared down quite severely before reaching the main rotor.
Any decent DSM-II or DSM-X (or other manufacturer’s equivalent) will have a failsafe mode (cut power to the motors if signal integrity is lost), even the older 35MHz PCM RC gear had failsafes. They will failsafe also if the receiver’s voltage sags – I’ve had this happen, a chafing wire caused my receiver to failsafe resulting in an autorotation, basically it failsafes before stuff gets so bad that you can’t control the servos. Since using PCM and later 2.4GHz DSM radio control gear, I have never suffered a loss of control due to radio failure. It’s been absolutely bulletproof.
What RC helicopter do you have, out of interest..?
Remote controls are used on traveling cranes in factories, which could be lifting many tons and which could obviously cause problems if they went bonkers. Unfortunately costs for the controls for these are in four figures.
For aircraft mover I would have thought a hand held controller on an extendible umbilical cord would be easy enough to use and would get over the problems of failure
I have three (one part built, one fully built but waiting a replacement part, and one that got crashed severely a couple of months ago but I’ve not had time to rebuild!) T-Rex 500 (crashed one), T-Rex 600 (scale Agusta 109, waiting for a part), T-Rex 700 (half built). All electric.
I have three too – a T-Rex 250 for practice. A 450 with a camera mount for taking pictures, and a Logo 600SE (690) for fun.
And here is Thingy in action. Seen last weekend at the AOPA fly-in at Chino, CA.
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That’s what I would have liked to have to pull the a/c across the stony GA parking at Calvi!
According to the gent who demoed it, it can pull a/c across grass, but of course there’s a limit. From the pics I’ve seen on here, Calvi should have worked. In any case, the one in the video is the smaller model – you can see the bigger one in the background at the beginning of the video – and it’s handling a Twin Commander (around 2 tons) very well. Have to say, the little thing looks like something straight out of a Star Wars movie! Makes you laugh when you see it.
looking for ideas and experiance with aircraft tugs for getting airplane in and outof hangar or also some portable solutions
i am looking into buying one but would like to hear from you all that are allready using somthing about there feedback
thanks
Have you done a search for the word ‘tug’ ?
