Well I guess after 4 months of hanging from my ceiling enjoying the indoors, the day of reckoning for this has finally come...
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For the maiden I had one of my club instructors with a good 45 years of RC experience take it up for me, but nonetheless it wasn't without incident, though thankfully the majority of problems occurred on the ground. Firstly the screws holding the wing struts to the bottom of the fuselage immediately stripped out. I honestly can't say I didn't expect this to happen since the fuselage bottom is constructed from just 3/32 balsa sheet and it's pretty soft sheet at that. Oh well, it's what the plans told me to do... I guess to remedy it I'll put in some 1/8 lite ply or something for the screws to go into, so they'll be less inclined to leave the airplane. Anyway, the flight went on after we just took the wing struts off. They do nothing structurally so it's not like their absence was a real problem. I might have skimped slightly on the toe-in angle on the gear - you generally want about 2 degrees toe-in total to give good ground handling, but I did that stage of construction in like December of last year so it's not like I remember what I did exactly. For that reason trying to take off from the geomat turned into groundloop hell and we had to use the grass.
From there though it actually went relatively well. The primary issues encountered in the air were a crappy CG and sticky ailerons. It was a little tail heavy and needed loads of down trim, and I'm thinking the 1 3/4 oz of nose weight I added wasn't quite sufficient. Might need to add another ounce. Not like total weight is a problem - contrary to what I expected, in the power department it seems fine. I guess that ASP 52 is enough after all as I saw for most of the flight it was putting around at barely half throttle. I filled the 10 oz tank to the brim and after probably 10 minutes of flight I drained it and it'd only drank probably 25% of it.
The ailerons though, that's a much more severe issue. It had issues where the servo refused to properly center, making trimming it to be level incredibly hard - I'm like 99% sure the aileron bellcrank system is causing it. Airplanes have no real need for them now that servos aren't dummy expensive like they were in the old days. I'm really not sure why I decided to stick with the plans and build it with that system instead of swapping it with a dual servo system which in hindsight would have been much better. Oh well, more work to do...
Here's a shot of the car this morning. I'm really not sure how I got all these in here. I actually got to fly all of them too! Well, except for one. The Littlest Stick's engine refused to start...
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