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Old 10-12-2008 | 02:07 PM
  #30  
sanman55
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From: powder springs, GA
Default RE: f-4E PHANTOM {BLUE ANGELS}

cg- I found this great article on testing your cg. I think its worth looking at. Enjoy

Step 1: Basic trimming.
Fly like you usually do. Make sure you fly without any weird roll or yaw tendencies across a wide variety of throttle settings. In particular, make sure your motor thrust angle is not pulling you left or right at full throttle. Pitching up and down we will deal with after we fine-tune the CG, as long as it's not a huge, obvious problem. Like on my P-47, the moment I throttled up the nose would go down, even if I'd picked up no speed yet. That was a pretty obvious thrust-angle issue I had to correct before I could fine-tune my CG. If you require more than a couple of clicks of trim in any direction to stay in trim, land your bird and adjust the mechanical linkages themselves so that your plane is just about perfectly in "trim" without needing trim adjustments on the transmitter.

Step 2: Floating.
At about "three mistakes high", idle down to as slow as you can go without losing altitude and maintain level flight without a significant nose-up attitude. Do a few passes back and forth to make sure that you are trimmed perfectly to fly level, hands-off, at a very slow speed, just a few knots above stall speed if possible.

Step 3: Shallow dive test
From about "three mistakes high", going at the same flat, level, slow speed as in step 2, pitch your bird down about twenty degrees while maintaining throttle. This is a fairly shallow dive, but it should be steep enough that your bird is obviously picking up speed. Watch the nose.
If the nose pitches up (the dive flattens), you are nose-heavy.
If the nose pitches down (the dive steepens), you are tail-heavy.

I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but what you are doing with this test is increasing the air-flow over your horizontal stabilizer. If your plane is nose-heavy, your elevator will be trimmed with a significant amount of "up" to keep flat and level at low speed. Increasing speed makes the nose pitch up, since the elevator gains extra authority at higher speeds.

Repeat the shallow dive test until the plane tracks along the glide path perfectly. Some people prefer a slight bit of nose-heaviness; if you are in that camp, then trim it so that rather than tracking straight in, it slowly pulls out of the dive over 2-5 seconds.

Once you have this done, if you have a flat-bottom airfoil you may actually be slightly tail-heavy. Aerodynamics at work It's your choice to adjust it where you want it from here, but you know you're in the right ballpark for good flight performance.

Now that we have straight and level slow-flight characteristics, and no tendency to pitch into or out of a shallow dive at low speed, let's adjust the thrust angle.

Step 4: Thrust angle and lateral CG.
You should have made sure your plane was balanced laterally on the bench. Balancing on the spinner and the tip of the rudder with the tips of your fingers, it should have no tendency to tip either way more than the other. Aerobatic aircraft will tend to tip out of this test, but as long as one side isn't favored more than the other, you're fine.
At the field, put your plane into a steep climb, preferably 45 degrees. If your plane doesn't have the power to hold this for a few seconds, you may need to enter the climb from a dive. Do this 45 degree climb repeatedly (at least 5-10 times), with enough power to fall out of the climb after 2-5 seconds. Does the plane tend to fall out in a particular direction each time?
If it tips on the right wing consistently, either you are not laterally balanced or you have too much right thrust on your motor. Use washers or some sort of shim to correct the thrust angle to the left.
If it tips to the left, do the same but angle the motor right.
If it falls on the nose consistently from 45 degrees, you probably have too much down-thrust on your motor. Use a shim or washer to trim it upwards.
If the steepness of the climb increases on its own until the plane falls out towards the canopy, you are either tail-heavy or have too much up-thrust on your motor. Adjust your CG or use shims to add more down-thrust.