Frog Junior Sailplane scratchbuild

speedbirdted

Legendary member
And she's done! I like the color scheme the guy decided to go with. AUW with a 1S rx battery is 28 grams. I don't remember exactly what the weight of the naked wood was but I think it was about half that; in any case, a 50-50 airframe to electronics weight ratio is pretty good. This thing should glide all day. He had to add a single 3.5mm nut in the cockpit to maintain CG. He also told me he's going to add a lego figure in the cockpit with a little windshield. I was hoping he'd do something like that.

Would you believe (by his account) that this is the first airplane he's ever done in tissue? I almost don't...

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Jackson T

Elite member
Nice build, it would be cool to see this flown with a mini rubber band high start setup. Any flight footage?
 

speedbirdted

Legendary member
None yet. Even though we had it out yesterday I forgot to record any :confused: Launching it with a rubber band is exactly what we've been doing and it works perfectly for it. Even the tiniest thermals carry it forever.
 

Jackson T

Elite member
None yet. Even though we had it out yesterday I forgot to record any :confused: Launching it with a rubber band is exactly what we've been doing and it works perfectly for it. Even the tiniest thermals carry it forever.
Nice! I look forward to seeing some footage when you get around to it.
 

speedbirdted

Legendary member
Well that didn't take long did it? :rolleyes:

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He told me that this is all ground-induced damage from a bad launch. I'm relieved actually, as that means the wing didn't fold up in the air (which would be a construction error on my behalf!) Hard to tell since this is the only picture he sent, but it looks repairable. He's going to give the plane back to me to fix it sometime. Just a broke wing and some crunching in the fuselage which should be pretty easy to rectify with some carefully placed CA. It'll need a patch or two, but that's not my task to do...
 

TooJung2Die

Master member
That's never good to see but it's fixable. I'm usually not happy with tissue patches. Hopefully he used glue stick to attach the tissue. I've stripped and recovered tissue many times. Spray it with 90% denatured ethyl alcohol and the tissue peels right off. Don't even have to wait for it to soak in. Alcohol softens the glue stick but doesn't weaken the tissue like water. Makes repairing the balsa much easier without the tissue in the way.
 

speedbirdted

Legendary member
Thanks for the tip- I've never even done anything with tissue so I was wondering myself how to get it off. He said he's going to re-cover the entire wing, as he didn't get the tissue applied on it well in the first place.
 

TooJung2Die

Master member
Just hope he used water based adhesive and didn't go old-school and use dope to stick it down. The only way to get that off is sandpaper. I've done it, it's not hard, it just takes a lot longer.
 

speedbirdted

Legendary member
I got the airplane back today. In short: It needs a bit of TLC but after that it'll definitely fly again.

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Unfortunately, dope appears to have been used so I had to work a little harder to get the tissue off, but for the most part it came off pretty well. The guy said to leave as much tissue as I could; he will try patching it, but if it doesn't work, it'll just get new tissue.

For the fuselage, the majority of the damage was to the second fuselage former; it's broken into 5 pieces and one of them is missing entirely. Two of the longerons are also cracked and one is gone completely but those shouldn't be too hard to replace and fix. I think I'm going to repair the mangled former in situ; taking it apart to install a new one would involve rebuilding most of the forward fuselage, which surprisingly has zero damage whatsoever. Building a piece to match the broken one and then hitting all the cracks with thin CA after jigging it to keep it straight should clean it right up.

For now I concentrated on the wing which presented some challenges of its own. Here's what we're dealing with; pretty clean breaks on everything. Easy to repair, but I took some extra precautions to keep the wing strong while minimizing the weight gain.

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The broken spar required the most work. Just fabricating a new stick and gluing it in with butt joints on the remaining bit of spar would just be begging for an in-flight failure. So first, I got to work clearing what remained of the broken spar out of the sandwich joint between the two spars in the center wing. I got probably 95% of it out, which is fine.

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Framing everything up, just to make sure I would preserve the original dihedral angle. I also did some looking and found the piece of the leading edge that broke off, and it will get reused.

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Quick and dirty scarf joint on the new spar, to make it as strong as possible. This stick fits in the gap left by the old spar in the wing center section perfectly.

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And, after gluing everything back together. The geometry of the leading and trailing edges prevented making effective scarf joints so I added 1/32 square ply braces to them; the wing feels just as strong as it did originally. They're also impossible to see in this picture for some reason :unsure: According to my scale all this work increased the wing weight by just 0.33 grams, though I did remove some tissue and didn't replace it so it'll probably weigh just a tad more than that.

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speedbirdted

Legendary member
Time for fuselage repairs. First with the easy stuff; these two rear stringers were both cracked. They don't really take much load outside of crashes since the plans just specify holding them in with butt joints so I didn't need to do anything fancy. One was repaired with a 1/32 balsa patch; the other was too far gone to save and had to be replaced.

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This stringer was repaired with another piece with scarf joints. In retrospect I should have repaired the one on the other side first; it would have made re-securing the board much less cumbersome. The one on the other side was repaired in similar fashion except I had to cut the bit of broken stringer out of the former and make a scarf joint on the other side as the stringer had broken right at the former.

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And now, this mess. Initially I honestly though the former was too fubar to save here but some further though gave me hope that I could save it and that's what I ended up doing :p Here I have sliced the broken edges with an x-acto knife to make them flushly accept a new piece. I would have reinstalled the old one, if I could find it... but I couldn't. You may notice the replaced wingbed (the long piece sitting on top of it) is too long; I left it that way so when the former was repaired I could cut it down to size and sand the face smooth with the former.

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Here it is with new pieces installed. I stuck it in a jig over the plans to make sure all the pieces were lined up correctly when I put it back together. The only reason this worked is because I have this weird bottle of thin CA that isn't really CA - it cures really slow and can't bond your skin together but will still happily wick into wood and make the whole thing one solid unit, but it lets you move it around in the jig after you apply it for a few minutes. I don't remember where I got it and I have no idea who makes it - the bottle it came in is completely unlabeled.

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And with that, I'm done - again. Hopefully I won't have to be done a third time...

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TooJung2Die

Master member
Good repair job. She lives to fly again. The slow set CA you have might be foam safe. I get tired of waiting for foam safe CA to set and often have to use accelerator.
 

speedbirdted

Legendary member
All patched back up. Nothing was re-covered - I got to see the plane and you can see the seam where the wing was patched just barely, which pretty much doesn't show up at all in this picture. It hides itself pretty well most of the time. The one on the fuselage is more visible, but it still looks just fine.

He also added a little hatch with a Tyvek hinge that covers the battery compartment.

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speedbirdted

Legendary member
looks amazing!!!!! what electronics did you use?

It's a UMX board. Not sure what it's from. Maybe a Champ, because it has no extra plugins for aileron servos.

That's a very good repair job. The patches are invisible in the photo. Better luck with the next launch! Where's the hatch?

It's the bluish-black canopy-looking thingy at the front.