RCU Forums - View Single Post - BMathews,...incidence and angle of attack
Old 01-09-2011 | 04:20 PM
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Rick.
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From: Southern England, UNITED KINGDOM
Default RE: BMathews,...incidence and angle of attack

Ron - where you say the incidence angles are easily adjusted with shims for the wing and stab - well, Lol - they maybe on your plane mate!

If it was easy to re-angle the flying surfaces we'd not need to get so worried during the designing/building phase of our hobby - just flight test and correct as required. Unfortunately, re-jigging the incidence on a finished project can be a nightmare close to a full re-build, depending on what has to be taken apart!  A further fly in the proverbial ointment is that if you change the wing seat angle it will upset the vertical thrustline of the motor. I fell foul of this last year in a small vintage cabin model that had too much incidence - only solution in the end was to cut the tail off and re-jig it to four degrees (or so) more incidence at the tailplane.  On my flat bottomed wings i now set the tail parallel to a datum drawn from the wing TE through to the middle of the LE. This can make the wing appear to be angled down - but in fact its still producing +ve lift and on a cabin model some down thrust is also still required ( to counter slight ballooning on opening the throttle, not helped of course by the Centre of Drag line being well above the thrust line).