The Sabre - I don't even know what it is anymore
- Thread starter Yusernaym
- Start date
Hondo76251
Legendary member
I happen to like high wing, especially for STOL, but i do love the cruiser!
It is easier to get good prop clearance with a high wing, easier to keep a lot of your weight under the CG and, in my opinion at least, easier to sort out the landing gear.
That being said, nothing wrong with a modified cruiser! 😉
It is easier to get good prop clearance with a high wing, easier to keep a lot of your weight under the CG and, in my opinion at least, easier to sort out the landing gear.
That being said, nothing wrong with a modified cruiser! 😉
Yusernaym
Well-known member
So. Some more thinking later, I'm left with a couple of questions. I've never done wing-mounted motors before unless you count them on flying wings, which I don't. What I'm getting at is that I'm not sure whether to make a pod that comes out of the wing, pieces to line up the motors at the front, or to cut into the wing and set the firewalls against the spar. There are tradeoffs for all of them. The spar mounting would probably give me the best strength, but I feel like having the prop that close to the leading edge might not be ideal. Profile pieces to line up with the leading edge wouldn't be too hard, but I don't know how strong they would be. Pods hung just under the wing would work, but I don't have a ton of wire to work with, so they might make spacing difficult. What do you all think?
Yusernaym
Well-known member
Here's today's "progress" so far. I want to test the wing, and building a whole new fuselage would take a while, so this is my temporary solution. Some landing gear reinforcement, reinstalling tail servos, and mounting the motors are the only things between me and testing this. I doubt it'll work well, but that wing is ridiculously sturdy, and I had already written off the rest of the plane, so if it flies at all, it'll be a win.
tesseract
Master member
Yusernaym
Well-known member
You should've seen how it flew. That would give you nightmares.
Yusernaym
Well-known member
I actually just realized I never followed up on this project here. It's dead. One motor wound up in my P40, the other in my X-29. Since I converted the X-29 to EDF, I now have one motor back, but the one in the P40 is staying for the foreseeable future, and the original project I'll be revisiting first is the Stiletto.
Did you fly it at all?
Yusernaym
Well-known member
It had a couple of test hops before I tried it for real. It was not a well-approached test flight, something you'll find I do often. It was windy, and I had the flaps down, neither of which helped the handling. I suspect it didn't have enough tail area, as there was essentially zero pitch stability. I got it off the ground easily, then very gently pushed forward to get it level, only for it to dive straight down. After that, it would've required a full rebuild to fix the wing mounting, and I was getting tired of the obvious shortcomings of the design, so I scrapped it and built the P40.
Yusernaym
Well-known member
I think it would be fun to revisit this, as well as the Stiletto. I learned a lot from the iterations I did, and I feel like I could end up with some pretty nice results if I kept at it. Major sources of improvement are material choice, design, and electronics. Since concluding these experiments, I've bought a couple of fairly large (for me at least) 4s batteries, which would be a much better fit for this. I also know that the Elmer's foamboard I had been using was absolutely the wrong choice. It's stronger, sure, but it's so much heavier than Adam's or FT foam that it's not at all worth it for a whole plane. The design of the Stiletto was actually getting close to something I would've been happy with, but the Sabre as it ended up was never meant to be anything more than a test bed for the wing I had built. I had plans to make it a fully original design, but the time investment required kind of scared me away.
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