I really need to get some video, but she's had 7 flights so far and I'm getting her dialed in, one step at a time. With the short fuselage, extra wide flying surfaces, and generous control surfaces it's taking a little while - but she's getting to be very responsive in a way that makes me think I have a new fun-fly competition plane here
Dialing in steps - after the first pair of flights, I moved the control rods all to the outer holes on the control horns to increase resolution and decrease throw as she just wanted to jump all over the place. Then it was time for a little more weight in the nose after the next flight. Then more reductions in aileron and elevator throws through programming, since she was still giving me butterflies. Next I put in some aileron to rudder mixing (rather than just trying to manually coordinate the turns all the time) and she started to settle down finally so I felt better about doing more adventurous maneuvers and trying some inverted flight. Weird vertical stall behavior lead me to check out the lateral balance, and wow- I needed to add a 1/4 ounce of lead to the right wing tip to get her level!
I think this will probably help out the performance all around too.
The red checkers looked great, but didn't do quite enough for orientation. I almost lost her flying at the club meeting this Thursday when everything started to look like a little red and white dot going away from me.
But she came home, and since I needed to open up the wing to add lead for balance anyway, I switched covering on the bottom and she now has a new set of checkers!
I also need to do something to strengthen the landing gear. If I perfectly grease the landing in (which I've done about 4 out of 7 flights) it's great. If she evens bumps down a little bit, the landing gear bends and she squats down on the field so the prop starts mowing the grass. I really don't understand how they expected these gear to hold up under the weight of a wet fuel engine! While I've been able to bend the gear back in place each time, I really think a stronger - or slightly shock absorbing - gear setup would be a nice improvement. Any ideas?