Today with the watchful eyes of Dave Fitzgerald and Brett Buck, I started with 2 flights using my .012 x 60' 7-strand stainless steel lines that I normally use. This was done to get a "fresh" feel for the steel lines. On the third flight I put on the FINS 40G 65# lines. For this flight the needle setting was too rich to do a pattern, but I could do some loops and inverted flight. I could see a nice bow in the lines at this slow speed. The white color on the lines makes them very easy to see both on the ground and in the air.
The 4th flight I had a good needle setting and flew a full pattern. I could tell that I had too much wing tip weight as the plane was hinging on the corners. But, other than that I couldn't tell any difference between the FINS lines and my steel lines. Control response was the same.
On the last flight I removed a 1/4 oz. of wing tip weight. The plane flew better as if I were using the steel lines. Again, I could not feel or see any difference between the two.
I have little to add, except that, to no one's surprise, the difference in trim from steel to synthetic was very dramatic, as you would expect from the weight difference. I am not sure that the airplane was dialed in enough, nor was there enough flights, to see if the trade-off between tab and tipweight and leadout position needed to be different (which it might be, just because of drag differences).
But I can tell everyone that from the outside, there was no indication that there was any difference in the compliance, if anything, it seemed more honest (again, just from observation from the outside - after watching *many, many* flight over the last 45 years, there are usually some indicators) on Spectra. Hard to say for sure because the temperature went from 41 to 58 over the course of the session.
It was a very well-designed first test, certainly showed no indication of any problems or issues of concern with synthetic lines.
Brett
p.s. Sort of on-topic - a whole bunch of people have emailed or texted thanking me for "getting Spectra lines in the rules". That's very flattering, but, that really wasn't my motive nor was the rule change particularly my idea. The rules themselves had irritated a lot of people for a pretty long time, just because of the fact that the line diameters fell right in the middle of competitive stunt planes, and never made much sense. This dates back long before the 10G pull test, it made even less sense when it was based on displacement. So a wimpy ST46 pulled 45 lbs (which was frequently more than 15Gs) and required .018s, a 40FSR could easily fly 70+ ounce airplanes, pulled 40 lbs/9gs and could use .015 stranded or **.012 solids**.
Any number of people recognized long ago that, in particular, the line diameters made
absolutely no sense. I could have legally flown with .015 lead solder for lines - except that it wouldn't pass the pull test. This also eliminated or made pointless many other things that are likely to be a lot better/safer/more margin/more durable like Spectra, the Ukrainian or British carbon lines that would pass the pull test with abundant margin. But no one ever submitted a proposal to that effect, so, since while I have plenty of time for computers between my every-other-month flying and building sessions, and after the previous failed Spectra proposal, I went for the whole hog instead, and the CB agreed, so here we are.
I guarantee someone, somewhere, will try to see if they can get away with 10 lb Spiderwire, and crash in the process, but people used to do that back in the day before there were any rules, too. You won't likely be doing it at a contest because the pull test will weed that sort of thing out.