Yea Lee, two successful maidens in two consecutive weekends... yehaaa. The Funtana 90 last week, and the CAP this weekend. Sure is nerve racking to take a new bird up. Alas, they are both good ones, no suprises or bad habits. Now we gotta learn to fly these very capable birds like the big boys... the sim is going to get some healthy workout now.

Any thoughts about the float/rise on thottle down? Is it a good assumption about the engine being down-pitched?

Chasrb,

All the tail harware is standard Dubro 4-40 hardware with #6-32 attachment screws. The whole thing only took about two hours to fab and install. It's really tight, and adjustable too. We're really pleased with the clean and neat install. I don't have the packages, so I can't give you the part numbers.

We are 8 lbs 4 oz AUW. CG at 4-1/2. Zinger 14x6 wood. Low rates are pretty soft, with Ailerons and Elevator at about 1" defeltions. We upgraded the elevator servos to Hitec HS-6635's, still have plain HS-425BB everywhere else. Needed the digitals to better syncronize the elevators. Boy, you can really tell the difference in servo quality when you have cheap ones alongside good ones. Speed, smoothness and centering are SOOOO much better on the digitals. We'll upgrade the ailerons and rudder soon too, damn things are so expensive. Wish we had understood this early on, so we wouldn't have wasted money on the cheap ones.

Here is a snapshot on takeoff... totally easy to manage. I am very happy with how well behaved this ship is in the air. With healthy expo (40%) on low rates, anyone can fly it. Flies straight and solid, aileron turns are perfectly self-coordinated without rudder at low speeds. I love this plane. If you can get past all the poor quality hardware and fixing the bad fit on parts, it's a great plane in the air. If we can solve this floating and get the idle down to 2K r's, it will be perfect.

This Saito 100 has not been behaving well, just not broken in yet. We did a little trick a veteran showed us at the feild, where you pull the first coil out a bit on the plug, helped a ton. Before that, couldn't get it to idle smooth below 3200 rpm. It really labors at low idle speeds. We can turn it down to about 2300 now, but it is shaking the plane really bad. Trying to adjust the low-speed screw, but it's just not ready for that. Just impatient I guess, we only have a gallon or so thru it so far. It's running real smooth now at 2600-2800 r's, but it's too fast to sit still on the runway. Makes landing a challenge, it just won't slow down enough. We'll try an APC 14x4W next time out.

So IFlyit... give us more flight report details! That's three in the air now, but sounds like you're the only one thrashing it 3D so far. Anything to report? Why did you change over from electric?