I just did an interesting experiment. I took a hunk of scrap hard maple I had in my shop and carved/sanded a zero pitch prop. I used the same profile that Master Airscrew uses and measured chords and thicknesses with a micrometer. I eyeballed the point of max thickness to be at 30% of the chord. It for sure is not to the high precision that a commercial prop for models would have. I am sure that my prop has significant errors in the airfoil shape. But I thought it would be close enough to do some testing. It is pretty much a Clark Y type airfoil just as MA.
I took this prop and put it on an FP40. I found I needed a prop length of 12 inches to load the engine so it would spin the prop at 11,000 rpm at full throttle. I chose 11,000 rpm as that is about the speed this well worn FP40 will spin a MA 9x6 prop on the ground at full throttle.
Then I took this setup and measured static thrust. With my fishing scale I found that it produced 3.3 pounds of static thrust. I also noted that it blew only a very small fraction of the air that the same mill will blow when it has a 9x6 on it. It blew so little air that standing right behind the plane I could not feel the air movement thru my pants. I had to put my hand in the air stream close to the tail feathers to feel the air it was blowing. In fact the amount of air blown was so small that it hardly put any oil on the tail feathers after a full 10 oz tank of fuel was burned. A 9x6 would have coated the tail with lots of oil to the point of it dripping off.
A couple of calculators on line predict a 9x6 would produce something like 2.3 to 2.9 pounds of static thrust at 11,000 rpm depending on what you use for a Cp for the prop. This sounds like the right range. The
2.3 seems a bit low to me. But at any rate we all know a FP40 is not exactly a high performance engine.Now, I will be clear. I do not think this prop would have gotten the plane off the ground. With zero pitch as soon as the thing started moving forward at any speed at all the incidence angle of the prop would drop to zero stopping further acceleration. My point in doing this experiment was to simply show that you can make lots of thrust without blowing much air at all. Just like a wing can generate lots of lift with no downwash of air behind the trailing edge that is not exactly balanced by an upwash ahead of the leading edge or outboard of the tip.
If you do not believe my results go make your own prop and try it. It only took me an hour to make my prop with pretty standard woodworking tools. The only power tools I used were a planer, a jig saw and random orbital sander sander. I would think any modeler would have both of the later two. And the former is convenience not necessary.