Newway Q-Bee - The Sting of Mini (?) Motor Power

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dpower

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While at NIRCON last month, I was the fortunate recipient of a few raffle prizes, one of which was a Newway Space Models Q-Bee.

This is the smallest of the Newway models, and uses their standard ~1" square body tube, and is designed for 13 mm propulsion, the tagline is "The Sting of Mini Motor Power".

Being the first Newway kit, I was impressed with the quality of the materials, and some of the best LPR instructions I've seen. Top-notch laser cut fins, a very nice parachute kit, laser cut CRs (wait, is there such a thing as a square ring?), high quality round shock cord & kevlar, and cool square nose cone (wait, it's really a pyramid, not a cone, right?).

Assembly was straight forward, the only ding is there is really no way to fill the spirals, since the seams overlap instead of having a small gap. So, I didn't worry about it, hit the whole thing with primer, sanded, and painted with some good "Old" Krylon.

Decals went on fine, didn't require any decal film to thicken.

QBee-01.jpg
 
Hmm, what's this? There seem to be some parts left over...

QBee-02.jpg
 
That's an awful lot of nose weight for a 13 mm motor!

QBee-06.jpg
 
While at NIRCON last month, I was the fortunate recipient of a few raffle prizes, one of which was a Newway Space Models Q-Bee.

This is the smallest of the Newway models, and uses their standard ~1" square body tube, and is designed for 13 mm propulsion, the tagline is "The Sting of Mini Motor Power".

Being the first Newway kit, I was impressed with the quality of the materials, and some of the best LPR instructions I've seen. Top-notch laser cut fins, a very nice parachute kit, laser cut CRs (wait, is there such a thing as a square ring?), high quality round shock cord & kevlar, and cool square nose cone (wait, it's really a pyramid, not a cone, right?).

Assembly was straight forward, the only ding is there is really no way to fill the spirals, since the seams overlap instead of having a small gap. So, I didn't worry about it, hit the whole thing with primer, sanded, and painted with some good "Old" Krylon.

Decals went on fine, didn't require any decal film to thicken.

May I copy this one to the gallery?
 
When taking the parts out of the bag, and studying the square tube, I thought this really needs 18mm power, but how do I modify those really cool square CRs? Then I found that an ST-9 fit nicely inside of the square BT. But wouldn't the TTW fins interfere? On most Newway kits, they would, but this has unusual laterally offset fins, so sanding just a hair off, at an angle, allowed them to go TTW, and butt up against the MT. I used the upper CR as-is, to seal the chute chamber.

Though the provided chute was quite nice, I put in a streamer instead, the only hope of getting it back. Enough nose weight was added to bring the CG forward, probably giving 0.5 calibers of stability, if that applies to square tubes.

Gotta love D-Power!
 
May I copy this one to the gallery?
Of Course.

chadrog said:
Way cool! Any idea of the altitude on a D? Yikes!
About 1500', burnout right at apogee on a D12-7. I was hoping for a bit more, but needed a bunch 'o nose weight to get it even close to stable!
 
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