hsukaria

Well, it finally happened. After 8 hard flying years, my Escapade literally fell apart from fuel soaking and rough grass field flying. That is despite fuel proofing and recovering the plane as well as rebuilding the bottom front of the fuselage. I have flown the Escapade as much as all my other planes combined. Excellent plane and I got tremendous use out of it over the years.

I have used it to flight test suspect radio receivers and to break in and test several engines. I have used 10 different engines on it. The engines I flew it with were:

1. OS 55AX - an animal
2. Super Tigre G51 with Macs one-piece muffler - the default engine for my plane with lots of power.
3. Irvine 40 ABC with tuned muffler - good power at top-end but not as much low end grunt as the 50+ size engines.
4. Norvel AX-40 - Ok power to use as a second trainer
5. Norvel GX-40 - As much power as a 46 glow until the crankpin broke off.
6. JBA 56 - an animal
7. OS 46SF - sweet and super smooth and quiet engine with plenty of power
8. Thunder Tiger GP-42 - flew briefly for a friend to tune it and verify performance. Surprisingly good power for this plane and very smooth and quiet.
9. Fox 40 small-case - got flying nicely finally, as much power as the GP-42 but noisier due to old muffler. Benefit is that it uses cheap 5% nitro fuel.
10. Thunder Tiger 75 FS - only 4-stroke I used on plane. Used a 11x7 3-blade prop. Good power and nice transition. Flew for 1 day and the fuse finally fell apart from fuel soaking and years of rough grass filed flying.

I stripped it out last night. It will be missed.

I will be posting an add to sell locally a set of used wings and tail feathers (I never glued my tail pieces on and it held up for 8 years with no problem, used threadlocking compound) , a set of brand new wings and tail feathers, and a used canopy/hatch.

P.S. despite the big range in engine sizes and weights, I never had to add weight to the plane to balance the CG. I only had to move the battery to balance. The Escapade is not so sensitive to CG location as some have indicated in this forum.