Maxford Bristol F2B - wing angle of incidence?
Hello, has anyone had their Maxford Bristol F2B flying yet?
We (my son and I) have tried twice, first attempt a wheel collapsed on the take-off roll (grass field), and it ground looped.
Second attempt (with replacement wheels from Williams Bros.) it got in the air, but is so underpowered could not climb out and turn before going out of bounds of our field, which is ~200 m long. Got it turned and on the ground with minimal damage, but it was all very dodgy.
Motor prop and ESC is the recommended set purchased from Maxford with the ARF. Batteries are as recommended 2x 4S in series . Draws 580 watts at full throttle, held static, and voltage holds at around 30V. All up weight as predicted at ~11 lbs. So it is 50W/lb which is marginal but should be enough to at least climb out faster than it does. The instructions say the motor is oversized since nose weight is needed anyway, so the last thing we would expect is for it to be underpowered.
I suspect the wing angle of incidence may be wrong. How did you set the angle of incidence? It is not a flat bottom aerofoil, and the instructions and assembly video does not show a neutral reference line on the root rib (there is a fleeting glimpse of an electronic level being offered up to the root rib, but you can't see the reference points it is set to). I ended up using the flat bottom edge of the rib cutouts as the aerofoil neutral line. I emailed Maxford USA and got a reply but they did not seem to understand or address the question.
We bought this ARF on one of Maxford's periodic half price sales (on the airframe only), and it seemed at first like a great value as the airframe and covering looked really good; couldn't buy the materials at my LHS for even close to the price. However as we went on we found lots of problems:
Wing position is not properly defined (as mentioned above).
Lots of hardware like clevis ends and pushrods were stripped or to far out of tolerance to be usable, so had to go buy Dubro replacements.
Wheels are inadequate (see above).
2 of the 4 aileron servos were no good.
Lots of the assembly relies on blind strut-in-slot epoxy joints that cannot be adjusted once cured.
Recommended ESC sold with package has no internal BEC - had to buy and add. Could have bought a better ESC locally.
Decal white areas are too transparent, green body colour shows through.
Strut insertion in wings was tight and led to different 'parallelogram' angles between the port & starboard wing pairs and also skew between upper and lower wings in yaw (looking from above, leading edges were not parallel). Had to cut all the struts, assemble, align, and then drill & rivet struts using splice plates.
Anyway, any thoughts on how to get this thing going would be appreciated.
Cheers!