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Old 09-28-2009 | 03:18 PM
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JohnBuckner
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From: Kingman, AZ
Default RE: Need help Aileron flutter

Often in larger airplanes installing higher torque servos will not help. Low servo torque is not what causes flutter so uping your servo power is not really going to help.

For a small foamy or a small electric and forgive me I am not familiar with your airplane just roughly scale down the simple device I pictured in an earliar post.

The idea is in a perfect world if you disconnect the aileron or perhaps the elevator from the pushrod and it will tend to drop at the trailing edge. Now what we want to do is balance some of this weight by applying a bit of lead forward of the hinge line as you can see in the picture.

What we do not want to do and thats a good thing is to completely balance the surface so that if there were no hinge friction it would sit level or wherever you released it. Agine that is not what we want to do. Its been in my experiance that it only takes perhaps 5 to 10% of the weight of the control surface.

What that will do is not stop futter but it will push the onset of the flutter threshold to a higher speed that your airframe cannot acheve.

The actual weight you see or the distance forward of the hingeline is not critical it only needs just a small percentage of 100% balance to get that threshole up there where you will never fly. So do not be afaid to experiment a little.

Here is a photo of a fellows simple little eighty dollar airplane that had already cost him around 300 bucks in four servo's each time destroying the aileron servo(s) and each time he keep throwing more money at expensive servos that would not help the real problem i.e. flutter likely caused by excessive aeroelasticity of the surface.

I gave him one of the little balances that I had in my box and he finally was talked into poking into the airlerons and bingo. That airplane never had the problem agine after flying a hard life now perhaps four years.

John

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