speedbirdted
Legendary member
Today after a few flights in the park, I noticed the tape hinges had really started to disintegrate and pick up quite a lot of slop. I made the decision to get rid of them and replace it with fishing line. (Why I didn't do this earlier I don't know) New control horns are also in order. The ones already there are too short - the servos are very old and the neutral deadband is very wide, so the amount of stick movement where you get no control surface movement is alarming. No wonder it felt like I was flying with too much expo. I will make longer ones, so I can turn up the rates a lot and improve the resolution while keeping the same surface movement.
Slots cut for new horns. I will make them from some 1/32 basswood I had left from the Sprat build. I still for the life of me haven't figured out what this covering is, though I found it has an interesting property; it is not heat-activated. It seems the adhesive is like tape; as when I was holding the elevator, I accidentally pushed together both sides of the covering in an open bay and they stuck together! In fact heat doesn't do anything to it. It doesn't even shrink.
The tape hinges meant the surfaces all only had single bevels. To let the fishing line hinges work well, I had to add a second bevel. This was done in 4 or 5 passes with a razor plane literally taking off as little material as I could every pass, to minimize the chances of accidentally taking too much off.
New horns. I decided on a notch instead of a hole; I figured all I needed to do was tie the fishing line off to it, not needing a hole.
Horns and hinges installed.
Ready to fly again...
... NOT! Unfortunately as I was plugging everything back in I powered on the rudder servo to check if it was centered properly prior to screwing down the servo horn, and it put on a light show, released the magic smoke, and quickly made everything smell like roasted PCB. Turns out the cause was me being a dummy and deciding to directly power the receiver with a 2s lipo (coulda sworn it was a life!!) The reciever was happy with it, many can take it, but the servo obviously was not
I can't say I'm sad though. I've had the thought of upgrading these servos to something made in this millenium in my head for basically the entire time I've owned this airplane and now it gives me an excuse to do just that. I need to put in a big order for micro and sub-micro sized servos soon anyway (for a build you will see a thread here for soon, but for now it's a secret)
Slots cut for new horns. I will make them from some 1/32 basswood I had left from the Sprat build. I still for the life of me haven't figured out what this covering is, though I found it has an interesting property; it is not heat-activated. It seems the adhesive is like tape; as when I was holding the elevator, I accidentally pushed together both sides of the covering in an open bay and they stuck together! In fact heat doesn't do anything to it. It doesn't even shrink.
The tape hinges meant the surfaces all only had single bevels. To let the fishing line hinges work well, I had to add a second bevel. This was done in 4 or 5 passes with a razor plane literally taking off as little material as I could every pass, to minimize the chances of accidentally taking too much off.
New horns. I decided on a notch instead of a hole; I figured all I needed to do was tie the fishing line off to it, not needing a hole.
Horns and hinges installed.
Ready to fly again...
... NOT! Unfortunately as I was plugging everything back in I powered on the rudder servo to check if it was centered properly prior to screwing down the servo horn, and it put on a light show, released the magic smoke, and quickly made everything smell like roasted PCB. Turns out the cause was me being a dummy and deciding to directly power the receiver with a 2s lipo (coulda sworn it was a life!!) The reciever was happy with it, many can take it, but the servo obviously was not
I can't say I'm sad though. I've had the thought of upgrading these servos to something made in this millenium in my head for basically the entire time I've owned this airplane and now it gives me an excuse to do just that. I need to put in a big order for micro and sub-micro sized servos soon anyway (for a build you will see a thread here for soon, but for now it's a secret
)
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