ORIGINAL: runover1
I am through with UCD's. I was on my 3rd flight of my second UCD and the stab failed, (both sides). I did not have a chance to fly it 3D as I was still getting the motor to work right inverted. I was coming back around and thinking of pulling a loop at about 100 feet up and I felt a really heavy gust of wind come along. I was flying straight and level about a 100 foot up and 300 yards out when both stabs flew off at almost the same time. Upon investigation of the crash, I noticed the balsa leading edge failed.....
Sorry for your loss runover1.
What happened to your UCD is a well known "Achilles heel" (weak spot) of this plane and was discussed at length earlier (100's of posts back
)in this and other threads. The material in the stab is probably of varying quality and a lot of them failed early on, prompting a general warning to put on flying wires or, as I did, struts. See pics.
From your description yours might have had an unusually weak/soft balsa so it may be worthwhile to try to get GP to look into it.
I put my UCD together a year ago using a pumped OS.91 with a 15x4W and it is still going strong. Very good combo if you know to use careful throttle control and only go over 1/2 throttle to pull out and on uplegs. The LG fell off on the first Harrier landing. Almost no glue and the pins that should have held it did were only pushed halfway through. Had the fuse separate in two parts behind the wing box once when I hit the ground with a wing tip on a gusty day. The wing was not even scratched but the lightly built fuse just separated. Easy repair really.
With the CG way aft at 5 3/4" to 6" it can (at least my son can
) hover for ever. Knife edge is difficult without a lot of mixing, waterfalls are easy and so are flat spins, Harriers and elevators need about 30 degrees of spoileron but then they are rock steady.