Originally Posted by
rlipsett
you talked about poor handleing on the ground with lack of rudder authority and wheel authority. A possible explanation is if you have the plane pointing slightly up while it is sitting on the ground you create a positive angle of incidence, which means that as soon as you put any speed on the nose wheel get light because it is trying to lift off a little. Since there is no weight on the wheel it loses effectiveness. at these low speeds the rudder does not have enough airflow yet to be effective. test by applying a little down elevator at the beggining of the takeoff run and see if the handleing is any better. if this is the problem you could adjust the attitude of how the plane sits on the ground or just remeber to press a little down stick on the beggining of the takeoff run
there is no wheel controls from servos so I think weight distribution matters not. I think it's a combination of long grass and my front wheel being a little loose. It won't drop off as its slotted into a well anchored pivot point which does allow control. I just decided to use a fixed wheel.
I find a good way to get rudder control at low speeds is to give a burst of revs and full rudder. The blast of air across the tail plane then pushes the plane around. It works great with my plane to the left but not right. Strange when it taxis quite straight on take off. Perhaps a little left but ill have to look at alignment more. I'm not going to get into it too mush as I have an identical plane I just bought of eBay for peanuts and ill use wheel control.
ill also try my low wing soon when I can have someone video take off.