ahaacobbler

I built the Pilatus P4 from those plans. The plane was amazing. It is actually the only ace that I have ever lost. It would climb on the lowest throttle setting. I got it up about 20 or 30 feet and then decided to let it come back down. It had a plan of its own and kept right on climbing with no throttle. I watched it climb, staying approximately over my flying space for maybe 20 minutes, at which point it was just a tiny speck. Then it started heading out to sea. It was sad, but so amazing, it was almost worth it. I have no doubt that it stayed in the air for at least an hour, maybe several hours and finally landed with a nearly full battery.

more recently, I built the plane again, but scaled it up to I think 150% with simple photo copier scaling. The wing span is now 40 inches if I remember correctly. This one is also amazing. It flies so smoothly - no porpoising. I like to take it out in a light breeze and just float it in place.

A couple of things that I learned about this airfram with the AA electronics are that:
1. You need some dihedral. On the 1:1 scale plane I pulled the wingtips up with a thread streached between. That worked wll, but the rounded shape of the wing was kind of funny looking. The 1:1.5 scale one has some dihedral molded into the center and a lilttle more molded into the wings at the spot where the wing starts to taper. This looks and flies great.
2. You need a lot of weight up front to get the cg right. I guess this makes sense, because the design is taken from a plane designed to have a pilot that weighs as much as the airframe sitting about as far forward as possible. I put the r/x and the battery as par forward as possible and still had to add a lot of weight. I should measure it, but I am sure that it is more weight than the whole rest of the gear. For my next round, I was kind of thinking of extending the nose a few inches and maybe changing the whole rear fuse to CF rod so that I can get the CG forward without adding so much weight.

Good Luck,
Cobbler