Hello Mark,
I just happen to stumble upon this thread as I don’t frequent this site much anymore. What caught my eye, was the plans you posted on the first page. I think those are the plans I used to start building my Arrow. I got the plans from pusher jets forum over on RCG. I scaled them up to get a 36” WS. I did take the liberty to modify the build a bit and incorporated Shumate style techniques in many areas. See the pics. I like the flow-through design as I believe it cools the ESC & motor more efficiently. Unfortunately, after a semi successful maiden flight, where the motor mount broke in half 4mins. In, the arrow went in hard on flight #2. I’m still a bit dumbfounded as to the cause. After the maiden flight in which I had to trim in a lot of up-elevon, to achieve level flight, I noticed after landing the amount of reflex was huge! I took this to be a nose-heavy condition. I was back ~1/2” from the CG on the plans. The plane was also a bit twitchy during roll maneuvers. The response to roll commands seemed to lag then roll quickly. I had read somewhere that if the leading edges of smaller planes were too sharp, that less than stable handling can occur. My leading edges were sanded to a sharp edge so I rounded them off a bit, added some tail weight to bring the CG back hoping to get rid of some of the reflex and went back out for flight #2. When I threw her up, I didn’t give any up angle to my toss, (I’m tossing off of a hill so 30’ straight out gets me 15’ of altitude). She just sagged down the hill and no amount of up stick helped. Into the weeds and shread the nose back to the intakes!! D@mn! I hate when that happens!! Accept for a few dings and missing chunks of foam, the rear & wing survived intact. I couldn’t believe she wouldn’t pull up at all! The only thing I could figure is the surface area of the elevons isn’t enough. So I’ve cut them off, widened the elevons out toward the wing tips. The overall shape of the wing didn’t change. I’ve about got the nose repaired and should be ready for round 3 in a week or two. The power system is no slouch at 450watts and an AUW as pictured at 52oz. If you have any insight to my dilemma and or any suggestions, they would be greatly appreciated. Here’s the specs on my Arrow; Blu-core, FFF construction. Wing and tail are double thickness. 36” WS, 49” length. BP 36mm 1500kv outrunner with a 60amp ESC, 3amp UBEC, 4s, 3000mah 20c Lipo with an APC 8X4e prop. HS-81s for elevons & HS-55 rudder. Also pictured is my FFF F-15 at 39” WS, 53” length. Same power system but an AUW of 62oz. and a wonderful flyer. Love those bigger jets! Blue skies.
Rick