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Old 06-11-2002, 06:42 PM
  #6  
VoughtF4U
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Default CG

I set the CG per the plans and it flew fine. I did fly it a couple of times with it farther forward and farther back. Farther forward basically just decreased the sensitivity of the elevators, but only slightly. Farther back didn't do much too it, but I never moved it back very much. I had another delta once and if you moved the CG back too far it would snap in a turn and spin a couple of times before recovering.

Don't worry much about stalling this one. With the CG set per plans, the thing will fly with the nose really high and just mush through the sky. You have a lot of control authority the whole time and if it gets close to a stall the nose will drop and it will immediately start flying again. The nose generally falls striaght forward, but every now and then it might drop to one side or the other with no more than a 30 degree change in heading. But same as above, as soon as the nose dropped some it would start flying again.

I did manage to get it into a deep stall once resulting in a spin. You have to really manuever aggressively to get a deep stall. I didn't expect it to stall since all my previous experience should it would just drop the nose. Basically it went into a real loose spin, more of a gentle downward spiral. I tired several control inputs to recover but it never reacted to it. I thought my pushrods had popped loose or my battery failed. It slowly spiraled into the ground with the power off. It scrapped the nose cone and punctured a hole in the covering, but no structural damage.

After repairing the covering I tried the same thing. Basically I could only get it to stall and spin about 25% of the time when you really concentrated on it. It would spin and spin and spin with little chance of recovery. The only way to do it was full power and full down. Once it had some speed, then you could stop the spin and pull out. Moving the CG back some made it easier to do this, but it was still really hard to spin it. I wouldn't worry about that though, even if it does do that and spins into tall grass you should have no damage.

If you are not too far along in the building stage, you could think about adding some spring air retracts. The ones I saw with retracts looked a lot cooler and flew a little faster. All in all it is a great plane, I am sorry I sold mine!