critterhunter

My friend Dave who has the farm we fly on has only flown non-standard Challengers, Extremes, and F27Bs. Needless to say the electronics in his planes have often broken down, but this is mainly due to all the crashes he/we've had over the past three years or so. I asked another friend (Alex) to build him a glider type plane using standard electronics, since Dave mainly likes to glide around easy like but will do the occasional stunt.

Alex gladly donated the electronics and built him a plane, using a JR Sport 400 non-computer radio, GWS ESC, 2408-10 (2410-08?) motor, a JR RX, and two Eflite servos. We both donated him a few lipos that could no longer handle the higher amp draws of our planes, and Dave bought himself a HXT8080 lipo balance charger for $25 to charge them.

The fuse is EPS sheeted with balsa on the belly and sides, and the wing is EPS with a carbon tube in it. It flew nice but after a recent wreck which stripped the servos, and then a motor failure which also resulted in the GWS ESC going bad, I decided to do a few mods/repairs and also to updated the electronics.

I removed the Tyvek paper from the wing, trimmed off the trailing edge of the tips where there was some chunked foam, and coated it with Ultracoat to clean up the looks and drop some weight. The wing also needed moved back some so it wouldn't need the nose weight to achieve COG. I threw in a Suppo 30 amp ESC (has an external BEC), two HXT900 servos, and a 2408-21 motor that Alex had re-winded for me, and buried the wires inside the fuse to further clean up it's looks. I also put on a canopy that is hinged in the back and held in the front via two magnets. To match the wing I spray painted the fuse red with H20 paint. Right now the plane is sporting an APC E 8x4 prop, but I'm going to check into something around a 9x3.8 APC Slow Flyer's amp draw. This plane is meant to fly slow and easy and with the amp draw below 16 amps or so to keep it easy on the beat up batteries. The 8x4 E should work fine though, and I think the amp draw with that prop is in the 12 to 14 range.

The hatch in the picture will sit straight but the paint was wet so I couldn't adjust it for the photo. The black canopy outline also needs touched up, but all in all I think it looks pretty good. You can see the hood scoop in the front for air intake to keep the ESC/battery cool, which exits at the top back of the hatch. With the red paint job it sort'a reminds me of a Telemaster. I'm planning to re-maiden the plane today when I bring it back to Dave.