Originally posted by Steve Campbell
<<The stock tailwheel is fine...>>
Until it breaks, or is ripped out by side torsion on a bad landing.
Two of the four flying here have had both things occur.
If every landing is a good one, yes, it is fine.
But this airplane encourages one to 'push the envelope' and try new things; like dragging it along on the prop just above the runway ("high-alpha" flight). The model flies so slowly that you become mesmerized and it gets away from you, and the next you know it has slammed onto it's landing gear. Is that the model's fault? Of course not. But reality sucks, sometimes.
Moral of the story; it is a quick and inexpensive modification to put an easily-replaceable tail wheel unit on the UCD. That "skid" area just in front of the rudder is solid balsa. If you cut a quarter inch or so off, fabricate and install a plywood plate to serve as a base you can screw solidly into, and recover with scraps of MonoKote, you now have a solid platform to firmly attach the after-market tail wheel unit of your choice.
You don't even have to trim down the existing area; my pal just glued a five-ply plate in place and bolted a Sulivan unit right on.
Below is a pic of how I did it; a bit more work, but more aesthetically pleasing, if that sort of thing matters to you. If you look close, you can see where the left rear corner of my plywood plate doesn't quite match up to the tail post of the fuselage, as well as the seams of the scrap MonoKote I covered it with. My primary reason for cutting the "skid" down was to maintain prop clearance; that 16x4W is huge. My pal has no clearance problem on his, but the model does sit quite a bit higher in the rear.
Whatever. If you land the airplane "vigorously" the issue tail wheel unit is not long for this world. YMMV...
Steve
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