ORIGINAL: convair580
I have been lax in posting, life got away from me and I have been flying other models. Quite frankly I am a little nervous about flying such a beautiful bird. Anyway I got her all set up tonight and went to balance her, holy moly! Nose heavy!!!
I have the DLE-30 with a pitts muffler, menze 18x8 prop and I put the ignition battery and switch under the chin cowl, maybe part of the problem, but she is still pretty heavy up front. Balance empty, upside down, gear down, at 175 mm.
Anyone else have forward CG issues?
May have to move ignition batt and rx batt into aft fuse area behind rudder/elevator servos. Not sure.
Thanks in advance
I have not had cg issues with mine - I built it with separate servos for each elevator half that are located under the horizontal stabilizer. The rudder and tail wheel operate from a high torque servo mounted under the cockpit with a 4-40 threaded steel pushrod from this servo back through the fuselage to the rudder and tailwheel. This moves a fair amount of weight toward the tail.
If you have the pitts muffler at the bottom of the cowl there will be a lot of heat on the ignition battery and switch - I would move them away from that heat. But I wouldn't put them back by the radio - you might get rf problems by doing that and get radio glitches. With a gas engine you should keep all the ignition items separated from the rest of the radio items. But I will say that some have found that they can use a single battery for both radio and ignition without having problems so you might be ok doing what you are talking about. Just do it carefully
.
I will add that its probably better to have a cg forward of where they say it should be instead of rearward - I once set mine up with a cg about 3/8 rearward and this resulted in the plane snapping out att he top of a loop with a very fast snap. I was impressed that this big plane stayed together cinsidering how fast it snapped. Sooooo- definitely avoid a rearward cg.
Ed