ORIGINAL: wsmalley
But officer, I was only testing my jet leading edge flaps mechanical thingy! I am going to have to study your solution carefully. I think I have the concept but I'm not clear on a few things. For one, am I understanding flaperons operating in only one direction to mean they flex from 'neutral' downward, but not upwards? I am also building an F4D Skyray-further along with it than the Su. My wife has some heartburn with the number of servos, etc. I've been buying lately. I have thought about building the LE slats for that too. Therefore your solution would work for that also. I have an 8UAF and the Futaba Techy here said I could have flaperons and elevons/tailerons but I haven't figured it out yet. I have the elevons mixed on Ch's 1 and 6 I believe which is normally the flaperon method, but, I think there are other ways of doing it. In the Su 27 DVD, the plane takes off, climbs vertical, does an inside 90 deg 'loop', rolls over to level flight, all as near as I can see with LE flaps down( max 40 degrees according to the specs I've read).
With flaperons, the neutral point moves downward. When the flaps are added both ailerons droop, but still function as ailerons. It's the same mixing functionality as elevons but on different channels.
On my Futaba 7UAF, the flap channel works like a standard radio channel. When the knob is centered, the flaps would be at the neutral position. Turn the knob to the left and the flaps go up. Turn to the right and the flaps go down. By messing with the settings, I can change this so that with the knob is turned fully to the left, the flaps are in the neutral position and turning the knob all the way to the right moves the flaps to the full down position (or vica-versa). IOW, by monkeying with the settings, I can make the flap channel behave as it's supposed to behave.
What the Futaba tech is talking about is probably channel-to-channel mixing. My 7UAF does the same thing, but the problem with using that solution is that only one channel (the primary) is moved with the trim slider. So, using this on ailerons or elevator is useless because only one side is trimmable.
Elevon mixing is built into my 7UAF and is done on channels 1 and 2 (Aileron & elevator). Channels 1 & 6 are usually used for flaperon mixing as you wrote.
The full-size probably has the ability to select manuevering flaps (or whatever they call) where the LE flaps droop to a more or less fixed position. I also thought about ways to do this where you could drop one notch of flaps and the LE flaps would droop. Next notch would cause the LE flaps to drop to their full-down position and the TE flaps would go to half position and the last notch would cause the TE flaps to go to full. But, this setup would be even more difficult to mix, so I decided to pursue the method I described earlier.
Dan