How about a helicopter race. The object of the challenge is to build a helicopter (preferably light) and construct it out of simple materials like a rotor, engine, and blades. The race will consist of four laps on land and water; each team member must race.

-- Mitchell K. Luehr (patton125@hotmail.com), January 17, 2001

Answers

Yea an rc copter would be fantastic maybe one team could make one with 2 rotors and one with 1 rotor They're hard to fly so they could just have the experts fly them.

-- Richard Manahan (rjcyclesk8@hotmail.com), January 18, 2001.

Would you honestly consider going up in a bodged together helicopter? Wake up and smell the coffee folks. First of all building a helicopter of any sort is EXTREMELY difficult involving counter rotors, vibration dampening and all sorts of nasty aeordynamic factors. Second the possibility of creating widows and orphans is good to excellent. Third, unless you seed the yard with a working jet turbine, there aren't two different ways to go about it.

I've heard several pleas for sanity in suggestions. Here is another: 1)Please read through previous posts to avoid duplication 2)Stop suggesting dangerous challenges 3)Keep in mind every challenge must have two ways to be solved 4)It must be simple enough to do in 10 hours

-- ChanzReed (uncleniblz@aol.com), January 18, 2001.

I would have to agree with the fellow before me. A helicopter would be to damn hard to make.

-- David Marcelli (dmarcelli@hotmail.com), January 18, 2001.

OK sure full scale copters are complicated, but I don't think rc model copters are that complicated.

-- Richard Manahan (rjcyclesk8@hotmail.com), January 18, 2001.

Yes, a helicopter would be extremely hard but how about a jyro copter I've seen 1 before and they look pretty simple

-- Billy Earnheart (billy.earnheart@earthling.net), January 19, 2001.

RC helicopters? I've built them and flown them for a few years now. You ought to see how many parts there are in a kit! It takes a chunk more than ten hours to build starting with a complete kit and all the parts. Then the setup time just to get it off the ground.

-- Kimberly Panos (krpanos@qwest.net), January 22, 2001.