RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

Speedaholic,

Turn the auto-focus off on your camera, if you can. I have no idea what you are showing in the closeups.

Just a suggestion...I'd really like to see what you did.

Don

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

Hi There,

I'am Lyechuan from Penang ( Malaysia), Recently got one from a freind who seems to give up
hope of his RearBear after 3 unsuccesful flight attemp which always ended with crashed,
so I've took back and did some repair and research, found out several mistake he has made,
first of all the elevator was not link up properly, than he's using a .60 engine with original pipe
for this plane, nice but very much under power, the worst part was the CG , when the wing is
attached with everything in, the tail was too heavy , this is normally the case when the entire fuselarge was made of fiber glass, believe it or not I have to put in 1kg of weight to get the CG correct. Anyway the plane fly just nice still with the .60 engine and 11x8 prop after repair and weighing over 5Kg, but could not do either loop or roll.
So I took out the engine and the counter weight, put in a US engine 25cc, crazy you may think,
but the weight of this gasoline engine is equal to the weight of the previous .60 engine including
the muffler and 1kg of counter weight, so far I've flown the plane well over a dozen time, able to carry out very nice loops and roll, landing is quite easy with fair head wind, need to polish
my landing skill with using flaps.

( In order to install the US engine to this plane, the original firewall has to be remove and replace with new firewall without servo & battery compartment up front.)

Best Regards.

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

Howdy again, gang!

So after three flights, and three gear rip-outs, I'm in need of a bit of help. Since my internet is slower than molasses in the middle of winter, could someone either send picts of an open and repaired wing, or point me to the correct page in this thread, also need the same for the brand of covering used here. I had previously fixed the wing without removing the sheeting, but I now have epoxy smeared everywhere and need to open it up and rebuild completely.

This leads me to my next thought, Have the Thunder Tiger people quit reading this thread? Have they offered anything for us people with bad wings? Did they have any idea that glueing landing gear blocks to nothing but the 1/16" balsa wing ribs was a bad idea?! The only failure I've ever had with a plane that was a manufacture's fault, was a Global ARF, I sent in the bad section (tail) and they immediately sent me an entire aircraft. At this point it seems it would be best for TT to send out new wings at least....


Okay, my rant is over for this week...

DT

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

Yo DT,
Got nuthin' better to do so thought I'd research your gear/sheeting problem. Try these pages:

Page 15, posts 439 & 448
Page 23, posts 671,676 & 684
Page 25, posts 740,749 & 750

Good luck and keep us posted! Btw... gear doors ready yet?

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

Thanks, Americ.

No gear doors yet. The thief that took them didn't make it out for Easter. Guess he was trying to sell a Mig, and had some test pilots flying them on Saturday - took longer than he thought.

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

Did you get your gear doors. He brought them out all fixed up. If not he must have forgotten to give them to you.

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

Hi Guys. I have been reading most of this thread since the beginning. I have the Bear with a Thunder Tiger 1.20. CG was slightly nose havy with this engine and Robart gear and struts. I had the stab failure on the first flight and reinforced the stabs and gear blocks. My biggest problem is that I cannot seem to get rid of the elevaator flutter; I even did the epoxy block rebuild where the horns enter the fuse. I finally added rubber band bungees at both ends of my fiberglass elevator arrow shaft. Nothing helps, it will flutter at 30% throttle with the gear still down. Anymore ideas as to the cause of this flutter. Only thing I have not done is install gap seals although the gaps are fairly small.

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

Dago, no gear doors yet, how did they look?

He might be holding them ransom for a long story christmas present....but I haven't forgotten. Your Jett Dago ready to roll again - 6th annual Mother's Day fly-in is fast approaching!

DT

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

I now have a new R/B I am putting the elevator servos (2) in the tail of this piece o crap. I think that there is to much Pressure in that area It's got to be a design flaw. One that we as experienced modelers (HAAHAHAHAH) have to work for ourselves. I have written Thunder Tiger 3 times without response from them. I use the motto " If more than 3 people of whom don't know each other tell you the same story of any particular issue there may be something to it (There are alot more than 3). I am telling anyone out there if you don't want dissapointment don't buy Thunder Tiger Products. If you want a major challange to over come several design flaws by the company who made the product. BUY A THUNDER TIGER RARE BEAR,,


HEY THUNDER TIGER DON'T BACK YOUR PRODUCTS, THAT IS A REAL GOOD BUSINESS PRACTICE.... YEAH, YEAH THATS THE TICKET?;)

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

Hey Itzdz, I feel pretty much the same way about their "customer" service.

But I would also like to note the fact that you are still putting a Bear together................

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

But it would sure make a beautiful static display model to hang in your bathroom for you to admire every morning and evening :D

(and just think how fast the kit could go together with no modifications whatsoever)

:D :D :D

[ducking]

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

Rocketman,

I have done a lot to my stab (all documented in previous pages of this thread) but have been flying it rock solid for some time now with with on OS 160 with no problems at all.

THe first thing I did was get rid of that goofy elevator pushrod. I mounted one high torque in the tail and made a forked linkage. It is only about 3 inches long and leaves little room for play. There is a pic of it some pages back.

Don't think you need two as the previous post suggested, this plane is real tail heavy to begin with.

Also, definatly need to seal the hinge gaps.

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

As a long time Scale builder I didn't experience any "Major Challenges" in correcting design deficiencies. Sure there are problems with the product as it comes out of the box. However IMO, I don't believe some of these problems (horizontal stab) would be an issue, if we as assemblers, weren't significantly over powering these models. The lack of glue and inadequete reinforcement of the landing gear blocks is a definate trouble area that TT should address. However one must also consider that Ace is the distributor that provided the Alpha/Beta testing of the product before it was released to the public. The pre-production kit that Ace assembled and tested may have had a higher level of build quality than the initial production versions that first hit the consumer market. If this was in fact the case, there's no way one could fault Ace for the poor quality of the production kits. But Ace as the distributor for Thunder Tiger SHOULD be putting pressure on TT to correct their production processes to ensure that the kit doesn't prematurely fail in flight or suffer other issues such as langing gear damage when built per the instruction manual.

In retrospect, there was an article in the March issue of the AMA magazine that indicates a large number of R/C fliers today are simply ARF fliers and have little to no building experience. I just recently joined an R/C club in my area and noticed the same thing. We have a larger group of ARF and electric flyers than we do builders in my club. If one of these ARF flyers were to attempt to assemble the Rare Bear kit, I can understand how they might be somewhat overwhelmed. I would not classify the Rare Bear as an ARF, there needs to be a classification that falls somewhere between ARF and kit built. The disclaimer on the box indicating the model requires ADVANCED modeling skills is too small and easily overlooked.

Rich

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

I finally finished my Rare Bear and have tried over the past two weekends to trim fly but it wasn't meant to be.

The first weekend I couldn't get a needle on the engine. I never could get the engine to enter a rich 4-stroke, only a slightly rich (with about 1 turn the needle) setting. Thinking I had some sort of fuel line/clunk restrictions, I purchased a new fuel tank and fuel tubing, all with 1/8" ID diameter tubing. Last weekend I tried again on Saturday, still couldn't get a needle, that's when I discovered carbuerator problems. For some reason the stock carb wouldn't deliver enough fuel to get a rich mixture setting (ASP 1.08 Redhead) . Saturday evening I installed an O.S. 7B carb from an old runout O.S. 1.08 in place of the stock ASP carb. SUCCESS !!! I was able to get a nice rich 4-stroke setting, perfect idle mixture with very smooth transisition from idle to full throttle. There's something magical about O.S. carbs, they seem to work, even on non O.S. applications. Anyway, Sunday we tried again, but Mother Nature conspired in the form of 15 mph winds, gusting to in excess of 20 mph. I'll give it a try this upcoming weekend, weather permitting, and report back about the outcome of the test flight.

Rich

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

They must have forgotten to give them to you. I'll hunt them down for you. Since they're to long to put on a Dago. The Vegas odds are already in for Sept. Dago's a 2 to 1 favorite.

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

Fool's bet...Dago retired, won't be at Reno this year.

Don
Go Bear

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

What do you expect, Don - If they won't let him cheat, he doesn't want to play!

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

Hehehehehe...good one!

Don

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

Well, the weather finally broke up hear in the north east and things dried up enough to test fly my Bear today. I've been following this thread since the beginning and I have to admit that I was a little nervous about the first flight after hearing about all the problems and pros and cons ect...
Engine..G-23
Retracts..Springair
Radio.. Futaba
Weight..Heavy
CG..Slightly Conservative
Prop..16-8 3 blade
Construction.. Did not use battery holder and such just flat firewall.Painted a little extra epoxy on parts and landing gear blocks ect. Located rudder and elevator servo in tail.

This airplane flew great. Looks great in the air too! It wanted to climb so what... so I just trimmed it down a bit .
No bad characteristics that I can see.. Landed soft with very little head wind. Fast even at part throttle. Our field is small and grass.. I believe it will do anything you ask of it.. Cant wait to fly it again.
I think ill seal the gaps.. other than that Im just gonna fly it..
Good Luck

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

WildBill,

I flew mine 2 times with no problems. On the 3rd flight we heard a noise as it went by. When I brought it in, under very close inspection, we found that the stab was beginning to come off. If you have been following the thread you have seen the pics.

Anyway, point being that if you did not beef up the stab, keep a very close eye on it. Mine seemed fine at first too.

Maybe you're lucky and got one where there is good glueing from ribs to sheeting.

And yes, the plane does fly real good. I love mine. I't knife edges like a dream.

Mine climbed to and I just trimmed it down. To compensate at low speed for landing, I mixed a little up in when my gear go down.

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

hi guy's

have flown mine 3 times now.....fly's great...until landing.....not so good.....first time around retracts ripped out of wing....wasn't that fast approach either.....on examining the retract mounts...found the ply wasn't glued together just tacked!!......glued the bearers back in....had the last 2 flights yesterday...again flew very well......hands off no problem......landing..same as above ripped thge retracts out.....some serious re-design needed in that area....i noticed one of the ends of the mounts is glued to balsa......yes balsa...not going to last 5 minutes....if th eplane didn't fly well it would have ended up in the bin!!!...but i like it.....anyone else replaced the mounts etc?......doesn't help flying off grass....but still should hold up.....weight around 10.75lbs.....had to add 8 ozs of lead after the first flight....made a massive difference...

dave

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

Your retract mounts ripped out?! No way!!

Just joking....its been well documented in this thread as a problem needing reinforcement...look back and there is a bunch of info on how to fix several problems with the Bear before flying....

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

thanks.....i'll look back.......

dave

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

I too, did a test flight this past Saturday. It took about 2 hours to chase the Gremlins out of my RB into another scratchbuilt oddity that did CRASH. Anyway, my initial test flight went well, like the others the RB wanted to climb. I found the plane to be sensitive in pitch and believe a little more nose weight will calm things down. Otherwise a very nice first flight until landing. The landing was done deadstick, the RB glides very well. Initial touch down was done a little too fast, as I let the tail down the RB balloned back into the air. A little quick down elevator salvaged that and the second touchdown was too hard and rolled the front gear mount out of the right wing. During the repair work Saturday evening, I found that when I reinforced the gear mounts I didn't get enough epoxy onto the front right gear block. It's all together again, but other committments prevented a Sunday attempt.

Just to remind everyone, I had made two additional mods to my RB. I reduced the amount of down thrust and right thrust from the stock settings by 1/2. During the test flight I had 2 degrees of downthrust and 1 degree of right thrust (measured with Robart Incidence Meter). The reduction of right thrust didn't have any impact on the amount of right trim needed for hands off flight in roll, about 3 clicks of right aileron and two clicks of right rudder. Since I only have one flight I can't be certain I have the elevators or ailerons rigged perfectly. If one elevator is very slightly off, it will induce a roll which I'm taking out with the combination of rudder and aileron trims. I also don't know if reduction of the downthrust had any significant impact. In preperation for the next flight I've added back in half of the downthrust I removed, I'll have 3 degrees of downthrust for the next flight. I'll report back what impact the increase in downthrust has, if any, on the pitch trim and pitch sensitivity. My hope is pitch trim will be less touchy and less down elevator will be needed for trim flight.

Overall I'm very impressed with the flight characteristics. The RB is fast and has great presence in the air. One odd thing I noticed, my RB whistles like a Stuka while in flight. I think it might be due to either the oil coolers openings in the wing roots, or possibly the fit of the upper fuselage/cockpit. The whistling doesn't bother me, in fact it's kind of cool.

Rich

Engine..ASP 1.08 Redhead w/O.S. 7B carb and Bisson Muffler
Retracts..Springair
Radio.. JR
Weight..10.5-11 lbs (WAG)
CG..Very slightly tail heavy
Prop..14-7 3 blade

RE: ThunderTiger Rare Bear
 

Just a note, I also removed some of the downthrust of my mounts as well.

The exact measurement is two(2) washers each side on the top. :D

DT