Hello all,
I decided, being bored as it now gets too dark after work to fly - that when my Mighty Mini Scout arrived (with the speedster that my girlfriend destroyed when I 'let her have a go'. Mind you, it was pretty windy
) I'd turn it into a build project and make it 4 channel.
Now before I go into detail with how I went about my somewhat... anemic airlerons let me first say. Normally when I order stuff from America (e.g. my Storch) it takes about 3-5 weeks to arrive here in the UK. I ordered these Minis the day they were announced, and they arrived less than 8 days later... As far as I am concerned that is excellent customer service, good job FT!
Now, onto the nitty shi... gritty.
So, I started as most people would by carefully measuring and cutting the airlerons after necking a can of Monster for added motivation:
With the ailerons cut, it was time to think about how I would move them. Having flown many an RC plane with the traditional 1 servo, two push-rod setup as per the bBlender I did consider it. However there wasn't much clearance in the fuselage for the servo; that is when taking into account the two rear control surface push-rods.
Also, I wanted to try something new, so I thought I'd experiment with torque-rods:
Looking for some torque rod materials I then scoured my 'spare bits/ dead planes' box, which is naturally overflowing as I tend to be a bit ambitious with the old aerobatics. Coming across some ultra lightweight wire from an old Dynam plane, I went about bending and cutting the first torque rod. Thankfully this light-weight wire was really easy to blend, however in my energy drink/caffeine addled state I didn't spare a thought to how it would perform under lateral force.
To my idiotic surprise I found that torque rods really need to be made of thicker wire; sadly the kind of which was not available to me at the time. However having no sense of delayed gratification, I decided to plough on, instead of you know... waiting till the shops opened.
The thin wire is a pleasure to bend, and with a few supporting 'kinks' makes excellent push-rod material. However as a torque rod it flexed waaaaay too much and left me with very little throw at all. I decided I needed to do all that I could to 'pin it down' to make it rigid, while not affecting its ability to freely twist with servo pressure.
I achieved this (to a limited extent) by cutting the arms off the many additional servo accessories I had laying around from 7 Turnigy nano servos. I then threaded the torque rod through these and embedded them into the foam-board, taking care not to let the glue bond to the torque rod.
Initially I only used two of the arms per rod, one at the servo and one at the aileron side. However I then noticed flex in the middle of the torque-rod and decided to add additional... 'hinge retaining anti-warp things'.
At this point I was pretty much done! I checked the throw again and although a little more responsive, it was still terribly lacking. I decided to put a larger arm on the servo. This helped, but didn't fit the old measurements, so instead of re-bending - I just rammed it in till it fit and stopped looking at it, because I'm a responsible adult.
Its still black as a witch's proverbial here after work, so I won't be able to put a maiden video up until the weekend. Until then I hope you learn from my many mistakes! (Thicker wire, THICKER WIRE!)
I decided, being bored as it now gets too dark after work to fly - that when my Mighty Mini Scout arrived (with the speedster that my girlfriend destroyed when I 'let her have a go'. Mind you, it was pretty windy
) I'd turn it into a build project and make it 4 channel.Now before I go into detail with how I went about my somewhat... anemic airlerons let me first say. Normally when I order stuff from America (e.g. my Storch) it takes about 3-5 weeks to arrive here in the UK. I ordered these Minis the day they were announced, and they arrived less than 8 days later... As far as I am concerned that is excellent customer service, good job FT!
Now, onto the nitty shi... gritty.
So, I started as most people would by carefully measuring and cutting the airlerons after necking a can of Monster for added motivation:
With the ailerons cut, it was time to think about how I would move them. Having flown many an RC plane with the traditional 1 servo, two push-rod setup as per the bBlender I did consider it. However there wasn't much clearance in the fuselage for the servo; that is when taking into account the two rear control surface push-rods.
Also, I wanted to try something new, so I thought I'd experiment with torque-rods:
Looking for some torque rod materials I then scoured my 'spare bits/ dead planes' box, which is naturally overflowing as I tend to be a bit ambitious with the old aerobatics. Coming across some ultra lightweight wire from an old Dynam plane, I went about bending and cutting the first torque rod. Thankfully this light-weight wire was really easy to blend, however in my energy drink/caffeine addled state I didn't spare a thought to how it would perform under lateral force.
To my idiotic surprise I found that torque rods really need to be made of thicker wire; sadly the kind of which was not available to me at the time. However having no sense of delayed gratification, I decided to plough on, instead of you know... waiting till the shops opened.
The thin wire is a pleasure to bend, and with a few supporting 'kinks' makes excellent push-rod material. However as a torque rod it flexed waaaaay too much and left me with very little throw at all. I decided I needed to do all that I could to 'pin it down' to make it rigid, while not affecting its ability to freely twist with servo pressure.
I achieved this (to a limited extent) by cutting the arms off the many additional servo accessories I had laying around from 7 Turnigy nano servos. I then threaded the torque rod through these and embedded them into the foam-board, taking care not to let the glue bond to the torque rod.
Initially I only used two of the arms per rod, one at the servo and one at the aileron side. However I then noticed flex in the middle of the torque-rod and decided to add additional... 'hinge retaining anti-warp things'.
At this point I was pretty much done! I checked the throw again and although a little more responsive, it was still terribly lacking. I decided to put a larger arm on the servo. This helped, but didn't fit the old measurements, so instead of re-bending - I just rammed it in till it fit and stopped looking at it, because I'm a responsible adult.
Its still black as a witch's proverbial here after work, so I won't be able to put a maiden video up until the weekend. Until then I hope you learn from my many mistakes! (Thicker wire, THICKER WIRE!)
