Continuing on with the Mountain Models love-fest before the build-along officially starts...
Here's my Lucky ACE, the first balsa kit I ever started AND finished! It's currently got 137 flights and over 18 hours of flight time. The color scheme is based heavily on a German WWI plane.
Somewhere around flight #20 I lost signal (Spektrum...) and the plane nosed in, just over a small hill by a small retention pond and out of sight. I figured it was a complete loss - either smashed or in the pond - until I got to it and found this! :black_eyed: Less than a foot from the water and in very soft ground, buried half-way up the battery hatch in mud. Absolutely no damage other than a broken prop. After flushing it out with clean water, taking the motor apart and cleaning it thoroughly, and then re-shrinking a bit of covering it was perfectly fine and ready to go again! Only a little discoloring of the balsa in the battery bay is left.
This is my Switchback before it's maiden flight, using the Sport wing. This has the SoLite covering.
One of my earlier flights with the 3D wing didn't go so well.
After a little time gluing the bits back together and re-covering the nose it's hard to tell it was ever crashed! The only easy way to tell is that the old and new covering overlap and it's much less transparent at those spots.
Here is my dad's Switchback in clear covering. To the right is the wingtip of his MM Dandy.
Here's my Lucky ACE, the first balsa kit I ever started AND finished! It's currently got 137 flights and over 18 hours of flight time. The color scheme is based heavily on a German WWI plane.
Somewhere around flight #20 I lost signal (Spektrum...) and the plane nosed in, just over a small hill by a small retention pond and out of sight. I figured it was a complete loss - either smashed or in the pond - until I got to it and found this! :black_eyed: Less than a foot from the water and in very soft ground, buried half-way up the battery hatch in mud. Absolutely no damage other than a broken prop. After flushing it out with clean water, taking the motor apart and cleaning it thoroughly, and then re-shrinking a bit of covering it was perfectly fine and ready to go again! Only a little discoloring of the balsa in the battery bay is left.
This is my Switchback before it's maiden flight, using the Sport wing. This has the SoLite covering.
One of my earlier flights with the 3D wing didn't go so well.
After a little time gluing the bits back together and re-covering the nose it's hard to tell it was ever crashed! The only easy way to tell is that the old and new covering overlap and it's much less transparent at those spots.
Here is my dad's Switchback in clear covering. To the right is the wingtip of his MM Dandy.
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