Originally Posted by
erans
Hi Manfred
Thank you for the kind comments.
I must admit that it does seems that the wing is on the heavy side. I think that modern CAD designed "super light construction" ARF aeroplanes spoiled us in recent years. There is a fair wing area to this aeroplane, so it should still be flying well.
I would love to see some photos of your wing and the changes you made (if you are happy to post it here). I am also wondering if you are going to build the vertical fin as designed or supplement it with Balsa construction (which is my intention)?
Cheers,
Eran
I completely agree that the current trend in ARF construction is making them too light. A bit of a contradiction there as I personally feel that to a certain degree that lighter is always better. In this case the ARFs IMO are designed too light for the materials used making them fragile. An example of this would be a 40% Extra 260 ARF I once had. The wing ribs all has cutouts to save weight. Problem was that those wing ribs would split at the LE and the LE sheeting would then split just in front of the spar. The fix was to add vertical shear webbing between the spar and leading edge. I think the fix added maybe 1/2 pound to the airplane which wasn't noticed at all in flight. Light is great when it doesn't affect the ability to survive flight loads.