I have been going thru old planes seeing what is flyable still and what i can get rid of. Came across this wing again, which i hadn't ever tossed as it was the first thing i had hot cut myself. In hindsight i was really wondering this weekend why i used flimsy coroplast with no reinforcements at all for the elevons. As a more experienced builder i can see now that this is why i crashed it so many times. The control horns are on the very inside of the elevons. Even if they had been in the center of them, the nature of the coro would have made them twist, but being on the one side meant i was only really getting a tiny area of elevon movement in the center of the wing, which is the least effective area anyways. So in a full speed pass they couldn't counter the wind, ie i would dive into the ground and not be able to pull up. So i decided to work with what i had on hand in the shop and give the wing one more try. Oh, and the elevons were super tiny, not deep enough even if they were stiff.
I cut them off, grabbed a couple balsa aileron stock boards and wrapped them in two layers of iron on laminate
I didnt have enough control rod material but i did have some small carbon rods. I CA glued the smaller carbon rod into some plastic hardware and than slide some larger rods over that and CA glued them in place so it doesn't bend in the middle.
I didnt have any screws for the backer plates on the control horns so i drilled some holes thru the balsa and pushed the control hurns up thru crashtesthobby style using some hot glue on bottom and top to hold them in place.
AUW on updated build is 1,245 grams. CG only moved 2mm back from original version, so basically didnt change.
One interesting thing was that i have removed the fpv stuff from the nose and these new elevons weigh a lot more in the tail, but when i put the batteries in it balanced right on cg. This tells me that 3 year ago version of me made the plane really really nose heavy. So i wiped the trims on my controller and will treat this as a maiden flight.
Power setup is 2x 1300mah 4s packs and a emax gt2820-01, which is the motor stoneblueairlines originally recommended for the VAS chimera wing. Basically its way overpowered.
