Just been looking back through some older topics and saw one on simulating jet exhaust and this brought a quandry to mind that I have been pondering for several years now, so I thought I’d throw it open to the forum:
Does anyone have any bright ideas on simulating helicopter rotor blades in motion? We’ve all seen clear plastic disks used to simulate propellor blades and this can look OK if it’s done well, but it would obviously look stupid for rotor blades.
The plastic disk could look OK for the tail rotor (which spins a lot faster than the main rotor) but I’m at a loss of how to do it effectively for the main rotor.
Any ideas out there short of actually motorising it?
What if you did the plastic disc thing, but then masked off some rotor blade shapes on it and airbrushed different shades of gray and black, to simulate that kind of oscillating, slowly spinning effect? It would still be transparent, but you could discern a rotor blade, and then a little bit of a “ghosted blade” on each side of it. This is the notion I entertained some time ago, but I haven’t actually tried it yet.
how about putting motors in them and have them actually work,i did this with a jayhawk helo and it turned out pretty good,you can do a search on me and find the pics of the inside how i did it it would be under jayhawk progress or it’s alive i think it was
Hmmm? A small motor would of course work for the main rotor and maybe that could be done on the likes of a CH-46, but for say a Huey, one will have to figure out a means of driving the tail rotor. Now a 1/35th Hind mounted on a stand with gear up and rotors spinning would certainly be impressive!
you could drive the TR with a tiny motor made for cell phone vibrate settings. I have seen this done in very small planes for spinning props.
Also, along the lines, a few years ago I was asked offline about the idea of a PE unit like Propblur products, a line of PE spinning rotors etched in metal. Since I have never once seen a Propblur product used at any contest I have ever attended, I told the gentleman my honest opinion that I didnt think there would be much of a market for it. Ifyou are unsure of what this product is, you can link over to www.arcair.com and look for Propblur under the product review tabs.
Thanks mate. This concept is approximately what I was thinking, but rather than using a full disc of plastic (which I think would look a bit crappy), perhaps using a disc with the “non-blade” segments removed, the blurred blade painted on using grey or “smoke” paint, then highly polished. This might still look a little artificial, but it’s my best idea.
Obviously, there’s the option of motorising the blades but as I said in my original post, this is not what I was asking ideas about. Also, as one guy said, this still leaves the tail rotor static (or as a clear disc) unless you are using a scale large enough to allow the installation of some form of gearing system.
at the '06 Atalanta show there were ( +/- ? 2) models which showed motion by cutting gaps from the outboard (blade tip) spaced evenly towards the inboard (blade root) end. The modeler further made the motion defined by leaving the blade tip ‘wide’ and root ‘narrow’. The modeler then made the motion more defined by cutting lines into the blades from tip-to-root that finially looked like the above (I used lower case l [L] ).