guitardude

Hello eveyone,

I just recieved my Starlite I ordered from Sig the other day, I've been flying been flying since the 80s so I'm REALLY used to planes with Alerions and we ALL know how much more fun you can have with four channels versus three. Anyway, I was wondering if any of you had purchased a Starlite and built it with Alerion? If so, I'd be very interested in how you built/made your Alerions and modified your wing.

In addition, and I'm assuming that the motor and battery pack I already have will provide effecient power, I have a new Welgard 2204 & 10Amp ESC that I purchased from Grayson Hobby that I have never used. The motor is rated at 75 Watts and for a plane up to 9 oz. Currently the largest battery pack I have that I can utilize is a 11.1v, 20C 800Mha Blue Lipo from Hobby Partz. I believe this combination should provide the Starlite with more than adequate power, but sometimes being an "old nitro guy" I have a tendancy to underestamate the motor/battery pack combo, so your advice is welcome. However, I have created a nice EXCEL spreadsheet to assist me and from the calculations I did, it appears that the combination should work fine.

So if you have any information on adding the Alerions to this plane and maybe verify that my power combo will fly the plane it would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

guitardude

Well, looks like not many people have built a Herr Engineering - Starlite, so I decided to document my build just incase some of you actually enjoy building from a box of sticks. Personally, when I have the time, I'd MUCH RATHER build a kit than an ARF. Plus it doesn't look like everone elses ARF once you get done.

With that said, I've already framed up the tail peices and the fuselauge and will be starting to build the wings in the next couple of days. My goal for the build is to NOTONLYput alerions on the aircraft, but to also remove some or most of the dihedrial in the wing as I wontneed as much dihedrial once I put alerions on the wings.

I'll try to post pictures of the build as I go just in case, as I said, someone else wants to build one of these with alerions. I have checked out several videos on YouTube showing the Starlite flying, it actually flys pretty darn good without alerions, but I just have to have them.......plus it will be a challenge to incorporate them into the wings.

Also, believe it or not, they have you make the wheels, yep, they're laminated balsa and hardwood, I stuck a picture of the laminations on here for fun. Note that I pinned the spoke peice on the building board and then layerd on top of that, the four pins ensure that the two spoke laminates and outer rims align properly when gluing. Though I've made both wheel, I'll probably break down an purchase some light "electric/foam" wheels for the final model.

guitardude

I've made quite a bit of progress since I posted last time, I've completed all the frame up and am starting to cover the aircraft. However, before go on, I had a delima as to how I was going to hinge the rudder, elevator and alerions, and I remember in the past someone like SIG made iron on cloth/tape hinges. I couldn't find the SIG stuff, but went Walmart an purchased some frabric "iron-on" mending tape (see pic' below). It's 1.25" wide and 36" long, and I believe it was less than $2.00. Well, got home and tried it on two scrap peices of wood and to my delight I was able to iron the material and it worked perfectly as a hinge. However I was a little leary that it might pull apart, "NOPE!", I pulled on the two peices of scrap balsa and couldn't pull them apart. YEA it worked! If you zoom in on the picture of the entire airframe, you can see the small strips of iron-on fabric I cut to use for the hinges. ALL the control surfaces will be angled on one side only at on a plane this small its nearly impossible to get the iron-on tape into the crevis for the hinges, therefore I opted to sand ONLYone side and ironed the tape to the "flat" side of the hinged surfaces.

Now that we have that out of the way, I had to decide how much material to cut off the trailing edge of the wings in order to accomodate alerions. I took a couple of measurements from my SIG Four Star 40 and determined that I needed to take about 1/2 inch off my trailing edge of my ribs. I Stacked the ribs up about four at a time and proceeded to cut 1/2" of trailing edge off of each wing rib. The pain in the rear part was that, ALL the parts on this plane are lazer cut, and I had to cut a notch in the bottom and top of each rib'strailing edge in order to accommodate the top and bottom trailing edge sheeting. Needless to say they didn't come out perfect, but once I got the wing framed up and sanded the trailing edge sheeting flush the entire lenth of the wing, everything started to look pretty good. Next I took standard "Alerion Stock" and determined how much of the standard stock I would need to cut off lengthwise. I haven't cut the alerions to width yet, I believe I'm going to have to cut them using a steal ruler, as I don't have a miniature bandsaw. You should be able to notice from the picture that essentially I cut the width of the "trailing edge" off the wing ribs to accommodate the alerions, thus the alerions will be the remaing 1/2" or so.

I had some "Solar Film - Solite" Covering left over from another small kit I made so I decided to just go ahead and use the same two colors, a tranparent blue and a transparent yellow.

Radical Departure

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Have you made any progress? Am thinking of building this kit.. still learning to build and it looks basic enough.