Progress... slowly!
Today's progress included gear doors.. more gear doors and boy was it fun!
First up, was cutting the nose gear door into its separate halves. Then some G-10 stop strips were placed at the front and aft edges of the doors and the door's hinged. The hinges were then epoxied and screwed to the center section. Surprisingly, it only took about an hour to hinge both doors, it went fairly quickly and easily.
Then the upper strut doors were hinged. The upper strut doors are a separate molding and uses conventional robart hinge points (the smallest ones) for its hinges. All of the doors except the nose gear doors use conventional hinges for simplicity (not by design, by luck! LOL). So, 2 holes were drilled into the core material of the door for the hinge so where the opening for the hinges fit flush up against the edge of the door. Then the center section was notched for the hinge and a hole drilled vertically down through the edge of the gear plate for the hinges to fit into. Then the entire thing epoxied together. Again, this was the most simplistic way of doing the doors and it just worked out perfectly and completely by luck (who am I kidding, it was all skill! haha)..
And a picture of it on the gear with the doors all attached (except the lower strut doors):
All the doors are now hinged. All that is left, is determining the opening/closing method for the big nose gear door and doing the lower strut doors, which are going to require some head scratching..
We also discovered that our nose gear setup is definitely not going to work, so we have to find an alternative..
AND
the airplane weights around 20lbs right now as airframe, landing gear and two 6s 5000 mah lipo's.
We also assembled the other 2 fan units that Tom got and put a pair of fans into my model:
Then we did a run-up to check the thrust of the motors. It appears that we will be upgrading our power system sooner than we expected. With the expected weight of 30lbs (We expect to need another pair of 6s 5000mah lipo's to use as useable "ballast" to get the airplane to the balance point) and only 12lbs of thrust with the current power package, that is only a .4:1 thrust/weight ratio. While I think it will fly at this, performance will probably be lack luster. Unless you guys think differently? Either way, i'll be saving up for some JetFan 90's on 12S which will give us around 20lbs of thrust.
You can see in this video how crap the nose leg is once the weight of the fans and a batteries is installed.. now just imagine another 5lbs of batteries... the nose would be sitting on the ground! lol
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