miklos
Posts: 187
Joined: 4/1/2004
From: Meriden,
CT, USA
Status: offline
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Well, I finally got around to maidening my F-16. I must say the results were mixed. I had no trouble geting it to take off with a 12x7 APC prop on my OS 91FX. Would have liked to try a 12x8, but my local hobby shop was out of them. Takes a long roll to build up speed before it rotates up. Once in the air, it needed quite a bit of up trim to get her to fly level. Once I got her trimmed out though, she flew like any other sport plane only faster. About half way through the flight, the engine started to lag so I decided to bring her in and adjust the the needle vavle thinking I had it set too rich since it was puting out a good trail of smoke. The first landing in a good breeze looked like a harrier landing as I throttled back per instructions in this forum and angled the nose up and used throttle to maintian glide slope. On final, she was hovering just above stall speed as she cleared the field bonudary and then settled in for a perfect landing. The rollout was so short, it looked like a carrier landing. After leaing out the engine, I took her up again and she definetly had more speed this time and was really haulin the mail, but again about half way through the flight the engine started loseing power so I set her up again for a quick landing. This time it was a bit rougher than the first and the front steering clevis stripped right out of the steering linkage rod. I quickly replaced that clevis and she was ready to go again afte some more tuneing of the engine. The third flight was just as short as the previous 2 except the landing was perfect with a nice long roll out. However, at the end of the roll out the left rear gear seemed to collapse. When I examined the retract, I noticed that the knuckle pin that the retract swivels on had fallen out. I was unable to locate it, and upon closer investigation I found that the set screw that holds the pin in place had fallen out on the previous flight and that allowed the knuckel pin to vibrate loose and fall out. I had found a set screw in the fuselage after the previous landing when the front steering let go, but assumed it was for the front retract. Apparently it was for the rear retract. Contrary to what has been posted on the forum, the knuckle pin is not just a press fit, but is held in place with a set screw that is impossible to get at to tightem without removeing the air cylander which I had to do to install and tighten the set screw in the failed retract. I cut a length of 3/16 piano wire from an old set of retracts I had lying around and used that in place of the missing knuckle pin and the retract seems to work fine now. As for the engine problems, I removed the engine and fuel tank and found that when I initially installed the fuel line to the carb, I spliced 2 lengths of fuel line together with a piece of metal tubeing and the tubeing had punctured the fuel line allowing air into the line probably causeing my engine problems. I replaced the suspect lines with a single length of tubeing and installed a new clunk in the fuel tank that is suppose to eliminate air from geting into the line. I was anxious to try out these fixes today, but the winds were gusting around 20mph all day and I just didn't want to risk it.
Hopefully I'll get her out later this week try test out these fixes and finally dial up some real speed.
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All Forums >> RC Airplanes >> Extreme Speed Prop Planes >> RE: THE NEW CERMARK F-16 BUILD IT BETTER, STRONGER, AND FASTER!!! 
RE: THE NEW CERMARK F-16 BUILD IT B... - 
I will probably bite the bullet though and do it since the last thing I want is for the retracts to fall apart at the field and lose a part I cant easily replace. 
Otherwise, I love this plane. The wow factor is off the scale. 
