Dynam Cessna 310 twin engine (ie Grand Cruiser)

I always wanted to try a twin engine RC plane and a sale at Nitroplanes put me in the position to pick one up at the right price.  $149 and it came with a 4 channel 2.4 Ghz radio already installed, a 2200 mah battery and charger.

Is that not a great looking plane or what?

Now, I can get into this plane's story.  The Grand Cruiser ships with small scale like wheels and a spring action nose gear.  This all looks great if you are flying off a smooth surface.  You can see from the picture how tall the grass is.  I needed to put on bigger wheels.  The nose gear was the wishbone type and did not permit a larger wheel.  I picked up a ParkZone T-28 nosegrear from my LHS and replaced the stock gear. With the larger wheels take of and landing was no problem.  This thing has good power.  The props do clip the grass some and you end up cleaning grass clippings and juice off the plane after flying but so far it flies well.  I started out with the 2200 mah 20C 3S battery and got 4 1/2 to 5 minutes on a flight.  Not too bad for two motors.  The battery was quite warm as well.  I ordered a couple of 3000 mah 30C 3S batteries and flight times went up to 8 minutes.  Flights are mixed throttle setting.  This thing flies easy at 1/2 throttle.  Will go vertical easily at full throttle till it almost goes out of sight.  Still battery was pretty warm.  I decided it was not getting enough air flow.  I drilled additional air holes and added an air scoop to the battery hatch,  More air in, it has to come out so I cut a couple of exit holes in the bottom of the fuselage.

The air scoop is actually the blister package from a pink eraser set from Walmart.  I took the battery hatch cover and went to Walmart and starting looking for blister packages that would work.  The eraser set was a perfect fit and the right shape.

After the first test flight the battery was only slightly warm a marked difference from before.  I did have to cut out the air exit holes a bit after a dive from very high built up so much pressure in the fuselage that it blew out the back window.  Thanks to some sharp eyes at the field I recovered the rear window and glued it back in. With these mods the Grand Cruiser is fun to fly, it is fast and will land smoothly.  The sound of those two props is very different and cool.  It always gets attention at the field.