RE: ZIROLI 98
Bentwings,
Interesting on tail separation: I've never had a tail separation (except when having sudden stops with earth) in the air. It seems like the owner may have made the tail too light and didn't provide enough strength along the fuse as with using 1/8" thick planking and fiber glassing the fuse, it seems like that would be difficult to break in the air. Also, the past history of the plane is not known, as it could have been in some bad landings, etc. I've seen pilots prank their gear hard and later, fly the plane and land gently and then wonder why the gear broke!
I've got a new brison 5.8 (about 95 cc's) so it should be plenty of power. A backup is a DA-85.
Thanks for the info on the doors.
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Wings (cont)
3-piece conversion (cont)
Left outer wing (cont)
Since the wing tubes came in, I setup the left wing and epoxied the bottom main spar and wing tube while the wing was on the plans. I followed the same procedure as on the right wing: lots of weight and then added the rest of the spars, etc.
Right outer wing (cont)
While the left wing was 'cooking', I made hard points for the flaps hinges using soft balsa block. I want the robart pin hinges to be at a 45 degree angle going into the bottom of the flap and wing's TE so I had to cut some multi-faceted pieces of balsa to fit the flap and wing. I first cut some 3/4" wide block and then custom cut each one to fit the hinge location. Being as only the top of the wing is sheeted and the hinges are along the bottom, I had to insure each balsa block is flush with the ribs nearest to it. The wing's TE balsa block had to have the V cut into it to match the wing's TE profile. A paper profile was cut first to save time.
The end ribs for the flaps were also cut and glued in.
Servo trays:
Got my instructions out to make my servo trays from lite ply and 1/4" spruce. Will also be using dubro's dual servo arms and a 4/40 heavy duty ball link was screwed onto the flaps control horn.
Dry fit the two wing halves:
I only epoxied the center dihedral plate along the main spar (and not the front/back ones) just in case I screwed something up and the wings didn't fit properly. I clamped the center of the wings together and all was fine getting 5 1/4" on each end per specs. The front dihedral plate fit perfectly but the back one was off a little so, after separating the wing halves, I only epoxied the front dihedral plate.
After the front dihedral dries, I'll slop a ton of epoxy on the two W-1 ribs and clamp them together. After that dries, then I'll fine tune the back dihedral plate and epoxy it in place.
Epoxying the wings together will insure both ribs W-1 are completely flush with each other. Unlike the right wing with the sheeting, the left wing gets the sheeting after the joining to insure no mis-alignments.