Thursday night and Friday night carried a few hours each, running late into the night, with today's session being a good six hours or so.
Thursday night:
The handy thing about rigging the electronics before the skin is it becomes easy to lay them out neatly. The downside to that is you risk glue dripping on them. Fortunately, this interior was quite easy to stick tape on and safely protect all the electronics.
From that point on, there was a lot of chaos. For starters, when test fitting the engine nacelle skin I put a little too much downforce on the firewall at one point and the
front fell off.
I hot glued it back on by the struts and stuck in a third strut for good measure.
The nacelle skin was a little bit short, but I couldn't be bothered to cut another, it was only a small gap anyway. Next was the fuselage skin running from the leading edge of the wing to the back of the cockpit. This one was a pain; a couple takes weren't wide enough to wrap around, one take snapped and on a fourth take, I cut away foam from the wrong part to fit it on the KF! Fifth time's a charm, though and I finally had the epoxy setting on it.
Friday night:
Friday night saw two more skin spices attached. The underbelly, which was pretty easy, and the tail. The tail, despite having two previous test-fit and re-cuts, still demanded a lot of trimming and fine-tuning. I got that epoxy setting on that and then it was 01:30am.
Today:
Saturday, time to really blast ahead and catchup on all my builduray progress. I'll get this plane done by lunch and make a start on the next one... Or so I thought! 😂
First step was the simple underbelly skin going over the ESC. Originally planned to be foam, which would have smothered the ESC, I cut the shape from acetate and paper. The a estate was sanded and paper pritt-sticked onto it, to make it white like the foam. Next task was removing the prop and cutting hatches. The front one is to access the prop mounting nuts - needed immediately as despite aiming to put the prop on straight, this method of frame building resulted in the prop's yaw angle being offset WITH the torque, not against it. So I undid two screws, slipped some washers in and screwed the motor back in. That top battery hatch seems to be the only one I need to get the battery where I want it.
Next I mounted the control horns on the tail and for some reason, the rudder was getting stuck. I'd throw it to the left, but when releasing the stick, it would swing into the full opposite position until I used the stick to bring it back. After cutting a hatch above the servos and another hatch in the tail-fuse, I finally found that the arm on the servo was slipping. I removed the screw it was using and stuck in a shorter screw that could hold it in place properly.
Next was the nacelle front. This was pretty simple; cut three rings, stick 'em together, sand them down a bit, stick them to the fuselage and sand down some more. Then of course, re-mount the prop and spinner.
Then I did the landing gear, which was again fairly simple, but still demanded a bit of time. By the time that was done, it was already 14:00ish. I certainly
thought I would be getting this done by lunch.
After stopping to eat, all that was left was the canopy. I knew I was gonna cut it from this bottle:
But beyond that, I hadn't actually thought about how I was going to make this. It needs to be removeable: it sits right on top of the battery hatch. This adds a bit of complexity - flimsy plastic and acetate would be easy to form to the correct shape if I could just glue it on, but I needed to work something out. The simple start was another back-plate to the cockpit that could stick to the original with a magnet then the acetate can be hot-glued onto that. I stuck the bottle-bit onto that with some hot glue (along with a thin strip of foam to make the join look nice) and eventually sussed out some foam bits on the fuselage that the whole canopy could slip into to find its form and with that, it was finally finished!
At this point it was 16:45. It's not like I couldn't make good progress on the next plane with the hours left in the day, but I'm exhausted and want to just admire the build I just completed.
It's the first 'master series' plane I've made - if we ignore the KF airfoils - and my most accurate rendition of a real life aircraft I've ever built. I hope it flies well, 'cause I'm really happy with it. The control surfaces are TIGHT, normally my builds have a bit of play on them, but these are dead on, with no subtrim needed to straighten them out. The throws are great and the power system is a beast for this size.
It's come in weighing 50g more than the PipeBipe which has the same wingspan and prop diameter, with an empty weight of 392g, a 800mAh 3S weight of 472g and that with a camera would be 517g.
What a journey. I know this has still only been eleven days from design to finish, but I was still expecting it to be so much quicker. It seemed like it was gonna be so much like the PipeBipe, but it seems when chasing a real design with a razorback fuselage, you get a lot more wrong in the process. Here it is next to all the failed skin attempts:
The next two planes, I am very glad to say, are far, far more straight forward designs. For a start, they don't need me to make any curved pieces!
