RE: V-Tail Incidence
Hi everyone,
Just thought I would chime in and thrown in my 2 cents worth as I have just redesigned a viper and cut it out so i could make improvements to the fuslage. I also ran into problems getting the correct incidence between the wing and the tail. According to my research the viper wing has 1 to 2 degrees up incidence in relation to the thrust line. That is up and down thrust not left or right. I had a guy explain to me that the thrust line is the same line as the camber line in the viper. So I measured the centerline of the firewall and the centerline of the tail and drew a line down the side of the fuslage. This line is the thrust or camber line. Then I measured down from the LE of the wing to the line and measured down from the TE of the wing to the line and I have a wing that is tipped upwards from the line by 2 MM. It was explained to me that the designer of that airfoil did that to get the optimim performance out of the wing. With that being said, where do we get our best performance, matching the incidence of the wing to our tail or do we match the incidence of the tail to our thrust line. It seems to me if we match the tail incidence to the trust line we would be more in line with what the designer of the airfoil intended. I dont know and a series of tests would probably indicate what works the best. Has anyone out there experimented with this?
Lenny