We're done!
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I apologize for the really crappy rate of updates. I've been going into pretty much complete self-isolation lately (I have an autoimmune disease so it's for good reason) so that means I basically have to order literally all the parts I need through the interwebs. I tried nagging friends to go buy me things, but they just waste my money by buying the wrong things. I got the electronics all mounted in - I had to resolder some things to the ESC in different positions to make it fit correctly especially with the receiver fighting it for space in what used to be the battery tray. With a battery installed it's still a little tail heavy, but it's also incredibly light for one of my builds - I'm still pretty sure mine is heavier than pretty much all the other Eaglets that people have built, but mine has the most power
There's probably still a bit of room to add a tad of nose weight still. On 2s on a 6x3 prop it easily climbs out of my hand at full throttle, but I think for the sake of increased prop clearance I'll drop it back down to a 5x3 or 5x4 if that doesn't load the motor down enough.
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As much as I love the look of the wheel pants, I think for the maiden at least they will be taken off. My mounting... thing... for them was kind of an absolute failure, and while they do hold themselves on while the plane is chilling on the ground, I have a feeling at the first hint of a bad landing they would leave immediately and take the wheels with them because they're holding them on! I made some fairings for the landing gear wires which serve absolutely no purpose, other than making the skinny landing gear wire look a little less strange.
I also built the floats. I promise it's the camera angle that makes them look so big
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Jk, these are going on my Valiant whenever float flying season comes. I am however going to start on the actual floats for these as the next phase of the project - I've calculated I need them to be about 15 inches long, and I don't think rudders will be needed. Not sure whether I want to build them from foam or balsa yet - the Valiant floats were an experiment to see if it would be viable to make some slick V-bottom floats and then polycrilic them and honestly it looks pretty good so far! However the thing with Polycrilic is it's kind of ridiculously heavy especially when you need to put new paper on, and with a set of balsa floats I can just throw some monokote on them and I'm done.
You might have noticed the graphics I added - I cut all those out manually! Now before you call bullcrap on me let me introduce you to my technique for cutting such graphics which I like to refer to as the
Poor Man's Cricut! Given the blatant simplicity of it I'm surprised I've never seen anybody mention it. This technique stemmed from an earlier attempt where I theorized if you stick monokote to something before attempting to cut it, it will make it much easier and straightforward to cut whatever intricate design you want, so I tried sticking it to some balsa sheet on a low temp setting to see if that would help. It did - but, when I peeled it back up the covering it left slivers of balsa stuck to the covering, even though I used a very low temperature to adhere it! This causes issues not only because it makes the covering bumpy and weird looking when it goes onto something else, but the chips of wood will reduce adhesion and make the covering fall off and go slack faster. I solved this problem with a material we all know of: Foamboard, or more specifically the paper part! Suprisingly this works much better because paper has a much lower porosity than wood so the adhesive takes little if any material with it when peeled back off, and it will stick onto whatever pretty much as it did originally. Plus, foam is cheap, and cutting up big sheets of balsa isn't.
All you need to do this is foam, some sort of template (if you are especially good at freehand drawing you don't even need this) an xacto knife, your iron and monokote (duh) Just stick the monokote to the foamboard and use the templates to cut out whatever you want. Make sure the iron is at a ridiculously low setting - on my very old iron I set the potentiometer literally as low as it will go. The templates can be made from pretty much anything - I made the windows by pulling up the template on my computer, then maxing the brightness and taping some paper to the screen then tracing it with a pencil (don't do it with an x-acto here if you don't want to permanently etch whatever you want to cut into your screen!) Then it's just a matter of cutting out the monokote around the template. The reg number and the eaglet decal were all cut this way, the stripe without a template. I might add more later - but I like how it looks now.
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I kind of want to build an OSMW Comet next. Nitro is calling me...
