Hi all,

Had my Mayhem for about 7 months now, and if I had to guess, I'd say 50 flights or more on it.

Here's what I've observed: The wing has develped some slop in the plywood bulkhead/saddle that the two wood dowels insert into. When the wing is bolted on, I can move the fuse and wing independently of each other (not a lot, but it's there).

The cowell is about ready for the circular file. Just part of flying, I'm not really complaining about it.

I did find that the lowest CA hinge on the rudder has broken free, and that bugs me a little. I've never had that happen before. Should I just cut the rudder completely free and redo the CA hinges there?

I love this plane and am sad to see it starting to show wear and tear, but that's part of flying. Mostly I'm posting to ask if anyone else has had slop develop at the wing mounting saddle, and also to ask about the CA hinge.

I have the same plane and some (not all of the same issues. Here's what I did. I went over all of the glie joints around the wing saddle again, this time with finish cure epoxy (the 24 hour kind) thinned well and allowed it to soak into the wood/joints. Then I got some wing saddle tape (thin foam) and placed that on the wing saddle. Last, I enlarged the dowl holes just enough that I could add some thin brass tubing over the dowels. No more slop.

As to the hinge, just add a Monokote hinge kinda like sealing the hinge joint to either side of the rudder over the broken hindge and fly the crap out of it.

I have nearly 200 flights on mine & still going strong, although I have had to re-enforce the rudder itself a couple of times. Hope I helped.

Hey, I have had no issues with the wing joint on mine (in the initial build I put a thinned brushed on coat of slow cure Epoxy on all the bare wood I could get to) maybe that helped. I did have the bottom TWO rudder hinges fail (one was probably gone before the other and I did not notice.) I wanted more rudder area anyway so I made a new larger rudder and used 1/4 scale Durbro pinned hinges (3) it probably has only had 15-20 flights since the modification, but there are no signs of fatique in the new hinges. I have never seen ANYONE keeping a log of flight hours on a model at our corn patch field. I see all the posts that state flight counts on planes, do you guys really do that? I do WAY more data tracking than I want to at work man, I just came to fly!!!!!


"if your not afraid, it's not fast enough"

Not really.I do keep a log of trips to the field though. I usually list the number of flights & what I took that day. I have a bunch of planes & it kind of helps me keep track of any issues that are popping up with the ones that don't get flown that often, & battery stuff, things like that. When I go to the field I go to fly so a log entry might go like this:

Sunday, 14 Aug. 05. Flew at Hanover RC.
Showtime-6 flights, aileron flutter due to loose linkage left side. --fixed
Goldberg Ultimate, 4 flights, top hinge on rudder broke.
Laser- 1 flight, lost motor mount bolt.
Hot as a Sumgun, it was 96 deg.


As you can see, it does have its uses, at least for me.

cstevec, nice answer, I understand your point.


"if your not afraid, it's not fast enough"