Well now, Toledo is over and and I'm finally catching up from the show. One thing I was doing while I was there was taking pictures for RCU of the show. When all was said and done I shot about 440 pictures of the show. It's taken the better part of a week to upload all of the pictures from the show, but I've finally got most of them done now. So it's time to get back to updating this posts of this build thread.

In my last post we talked about mounting the switch and recharge jack on the side of the plane. We had just cut out our mounting hole, so now let's talk about actually mounting the switch itself into the mount. As I have said before, the procedures may be a little bit different depending on which brand of switch mount you have, but you'll get a pretty good idea of what we are doing here. The first thing we are going to do is install the charge jack into the mount. Please make a note that most of the assembly has to be done with the mount already installed in the plane, but I am doing outside of the plane for better clarity of the steps I'm describing here. The charge jack will mount into a slot on the switch mount and will be held into place with a set screw (picture #1). One thing that I've always had trouble doing was tightening down the set screw and still leaving room around the jack in insert the jack from the charger. I usually over tightened and couldn't insert the charging jack. Refer to pictures #2, #3, and #4 and you can see what I do to take care of this problem. First push the charging jack from the switch all the way through the switch mount, then connect the external charging jack, and then push it back into the switch mount. When it is in position go ahead and tighten down the set screw to secure the jack in place. When it's tightened down remove the external jack and then reconnect it a couple of times to ensure that jack is firmly mounted in the switch mount. Picture #5 shows the completed installation of the charging jack. Next up we will mount the switch into the mount (picture #6). The switch will be held in place by two screws that extend through the mount and into the switch. After that there is a small cradle that will sit down over the switch on/off slide and that is held in place by a pushrod that extends to outside the plane. Picture #7 shows the assembled switch in place. When you have the switch mounted it's very important to make sure that the switch can move freely to the on and off position, and that nothing interferes with that movement. As you slide the switch back and forth you need to make sure you feel the switch “click” into the “on” position. The reason for this is because it's possible to move the switch to where it's not fully “clicked” into the on position, but yet the radio will turn on. What can happen when this happens that when you start flying the plane the vibrations can click it back off causing you to lose control of your plane. Trust me on this one, it's the voice of experience talking here!!! Picture #8 shows the completed and installed switch.

In pictures #9 - #12 please note the location of the receiver and battery. This by no means will be the final location of the radio and battery. It's an educated guess as to where I think they will mount. The reason why I say a guess is because the location of the battery and receiver can change when we balance the plane. In fact, moving the position of receiver, and even more so the battery, can be THE biggest way you have of shifting weight in the plane when you are trying to balance the plane. One huge mistake I see a lot of modelers do it to immediately start adding weight to the plane when they are trying to balance the plane. It's true that a lot of times you have to add weight to balance, but you should only do that after you try everything else. The battery is a huge weight in itself, and moving the battery can go a long way to changing the balance of the plane, so we don't want to get locked into where the battery will sit until we actually balance the plane (which we are almost ready to do by the way). Other things that you can do to help change the balance of the plane is moving the receiver, the servos, and even the engine a little bit.



Pictures
1. Installing charge jack into switch mount
2. Using another jack to help mount the charging jack
3. Position the charging jack in the mount
4. Tightening the set screw to secure the charging jack
5. Completed installing of the charging jack
6. Install the radio switch in the switch mount
7. Secure the switch in place.
8. Completed installation of the switch
9. Completed installation of the switch
10. Place the receiver and battery in the fuselage prior to balancing the plane
11. Place the receiver and battery in the fuselage prior to balancing the plane
12. Place the receiver and battery in the fuselage prior to balancing the plane

Until next time

Ken