For this post I'm not going to do any “actual” building. But instead I want to talk about something that I've noticed which seems to confuse a lot of people. I want to talk about making sure the horizontal stabilizer is level with the wings. That may seem like some fancy terminology but it all boils down to simply having the wing and the horizontal stabilizer being parallel. Even if the wing isn't sitting squarely on the fuselage it will fly ok as long at the horizontal stabilizer is at that same angle to the fuselage as the wing is. Keep in mind here that I'm not talking about incidence, rather I am talking about the level of the wing and stabilizer if you are looking down the fuselage. Incidence refers to the angle of attack that the wing and stabilizer have if you are looking at them from the side of the plane. While on a lot of planes measuring and setting the incidence is important, for our trainer and for beginning pilots having to worry about incidence is way more information than needs to be worried about. If your interested in how the incidence affects the plane I'd encourage you to spend some time over in the aerodynamics forums here on RCU, I'm sure they'd be more than happy to help you out. For the purpose of our build we will not be worrying about the incidence of the wing or the stabilizer.

Let me talk about setting the level of the stabilizer and making sure it's the same as the wing. I'm sure that if you look around you can find some fancy tool to make sure this is set up correctly, but in all honesty you already have the best tool for doing this with. In fact you have two of the best tools to do this with. It's called the good ole' Mark 1.0 Human Eyeball!! I know that doesn't sound like it should be right, but it is. Honestly, in the years that I've been building I've tried many different things to do this with and I always seem to keep coming back to using my eyes to make this check. To make this check it's really as simple as standing behind the plane, looking at the stabilizer and wing, and making sure that the stabilizer is even with the wing. It's just that simple.

While it is a simple think to do, there are some things that can help to make this a bit easier. So here are a few pointers that I have found to help me out. First of all you need to set the plane up so that the wing is pretty much level. I know that I said the actual angle of the wing on the fuselage isn't critical, but it is to the human eyeball. If the wing isn't sitting level it will cause the whole thing to “not look right”. This is simply an illusion that fools your brain into thinking it's not correct, so it's just easier in the long run to set the wing level for this check. Next is the angle that you're looking at. If you'll look at the pictures with this post you can see that the appearance of the wing and stabilizer will change with the angle you are looking at it from. So you want to be standing directly behind the plane, and have you eyes down at the level of the horizontal stabilizer. What you will be looking for is that the stabilizer is the same distance from the wing on both sides of the stabilizer. Make sure that you are far enough back behind the plane so that you can see both sides and that you don't have the move your head compare. Another trick that can help a lot when you are doing this would be to close one eye. A lot of time the binocular vision that us “top of the food chain” humans have can actually hurt you when you are checking this.

Ok, now with all of that said it really boils down to the fact that you want to look at horizontal stabilizer and make sure it's level with the wing. A lot of people won't trust their eyes when making this check, so here is another little tip that can help out a lot. Use a digital camera. Yep, pretty simple. Position the camera at the same level with and directly behind the fuselage, and then take a picture. You can then print out the picture and use a ruler to see if the stabilizer is the same distance from the wing on both sides of the fuselage.

Hopefully this will help everybody out, and I hope that I haven't confused you all even more with this explanation that I've given!!!!