GWS Slow Stick electric park flyer

2004.01.21

The SlowStick was my first electric and the plane with which I learned how to fly r/c.

It's a really nice and stable plane to fly, but I rarely launch it just for the fun of flying... I use it mainly to take aerial pictures, a subject I got hooked to as seen as I saw the pictures posted on RCGroups' Aerial Photography forum and realized it was something within my reaches although I had no r/c experience by that time.

I got the SlowStick on july/2003 following the recommendations I received from the very nice guys that hang around the AP forum. I went after the exact recommended setup: the SlowStick was (and still is) the AP platform of choice, so a SlowStick I got.

First task was to learn to fly r/c: I learned it by myself, without an instructor. The plane suffered a lot, but survived my learning curve.

By sept/2003 I was confident with it and started trying AP, but it was only by oct/2003 that my aerial pictures started to come out good. Since then I learned how to hand-catch the SlowStick so not to need any runway space whatsoever and got very confident at flying it on any but the most windy conditions.

My SlowStick is mostly stock... the only mods are:

I tried Uncle Mikey Mod (two links with info on it: thread on RCGroups and article on SuperFlyPlanes) to make the motor run in the right direction but didn't notice much difference so I went back to the stock config. I think GWS's 350 motor has neutral timing so it doesn't make a difference on which direction it turns.

The stock motor has plenty of power. It carries my heavy battery (180g) and camera (90g) up very well, it almost doesn't notice the weight.

The equipment I use in it is:

An ESC with brake is almost a necessity for AP since the pics taken with motor off usually came out much better. With motor off, a windmilling prop brings two problems: 1) it vibrates, not as much as with the motor on, but still enough to interphere with the pictures specially in low light conditions, and 2) it causes a lot of drag and kills the glide ratio, not giving you enough time to take a lot of pictures as is desired.

Here are some pics of my current setup (before the carbon reinforcement on the wing):

Although the stock brushed motor works very well I decided to try a brushless setup, main reasons beeing: 1) climb to altitude faster in order to spend more time taking pictures, 2) be able to fly in windier conditions and 3) I just had to have a b/l :-)

So, soon it will be equiped with:

I'm still not sure which prop I will use but as a good glide ratio is very important for AP, I'd like to try a folding prop. I'll start with a Graupner CAM 9*5... let's see if it will give adequate performance.

2004.08.04

The SlowStick is a great plane. It's only drawback is poor performance in strong or gusty winds... this is the trade-off for the excelent stability and slow flight speed, which are some of it's strong points.

Though uncertain I'm going to make it I decided to start building a new plane with all of the Slow Stick's good points plus the ability to handle strong winds.

As the Slow Stick was headed to retirement I gave it to my friend Andre Yamin who's been using it a lot, and taking some great aerial pictures as you can see in his site.

It's pleasure to know this great plane is not gathering dust somewhere but gathering air time and great pics! I have to admit I'll miss it...