The next segment I would like to cover is the nose steering, the FB Rafale utilizes the traditional Pull-Pull cable system in which I am not a fan. I like to mount the servo directly to the retract strut like many other ARF offerings. However upon examination it looked like it was going to be a major undertaking, I don't believe there would have been enough room for the servo to swing up without hitting the cockpit tub floor. The stock servo position looks like it was intended for the front tray, this also looked like it was going to be troublesome as the cables would need to do a 180 degree turn to get to the servo. I did try this stock location however my fears were correct, it took a huge amount of torque to turn the nose strut with the cables routed in that manner, partly due to the stiff centering spring.

Preliminary checks of the CG indicated that I was going to need quite a bit of nose weight to balance the model, the nose cone section of the Rafale is bolted on so I had made an early decision that I would fabricate a battery tray to fit the nose cone and mount the batteries as far forward as possible. When it was discovered that the steering wasn't what I wanted I decided to design a combination battery tray and steering servo mount. With this method the steering cables make a straight run to the steering servo, the geometry is such that it take little effort to turn the nose strut other than overcoming the centering spring. Traditionally on a pull-pull system you must be concerned with cables getting tangled on the tiller arm, I was reading one of Maj. Woody's build threads and saw an ingenious way to overcome that issue, he used Du-Bro Heavy Duty E/Z connectors Cat No. 489 and rounded the one end so the cable could not get caught on an edge. The cable routing was accomplished by using the center sections of Nyrods as my cable guides. So on to the photos...