We all love flying our RC planes during the summer months with the enjoyable weather and blue skies. However, with the warmer temperature that we enjoy at the flying fields comes the higher operating temperatures of our batteries, ESCs, and motors. No air ventilation is the worst enemy of these components. Most stock planes do not have very good air ventilation to take care of the higher ambient temperatures in the summer months.
With higher performance batteries, ESCs, and motors, your components can really heat up when pushed in the higher temperatures. So, to protect your investment and upgrades, it is a good idea to also improve on your ventilation in your plane. For most planes, this is not overly difficult to do. Minor modifications and ventilation holes can be cut in most foam bodies to allow more air to get into the plane and also exit out. In today's post I will show you a quick and dirty way that I cut out my canopy on the Monster Hawk to allow better airflow over my battery and internals.
- In the overview pic below you see the canopy that has the square notch cut out to force air inside the plane to cool the battery and other internals. I am going to work on hollowing out the underside of the canopy as well to all smoother airflow.
- The top view of the canopy off the plane. As you can see I have reinforced the sides of the canopy with black duct tape to make this stronger since the sides are weakened by cutting out the middle of the foam canopy.
- The underneath side shows the flip side of the canopy with the tape again wrapped around the sides. Future planes will include coloring the white sections of the canopy black to make this blend in better with the plane and make the scoop a little less noticeable.
