RIPMAX JUPITER
 

HI

ANYONE BUILT ONE, ANY COMMENTS ,WHAT ARE THEY LIKE TO FLY .
WILL A 52 FOUR STROKE BE OK TO FLY IT

FLY WELL

RE: RIPMAX JUPITER
 

Yeh, I've got one,
It's a zippy little plane with an Irvine .53 up front. An extremely good 1'st low winger due its tough (and I mean TOUGH) ABS plastic construction.
Recovers from almost any mistakes very quickly (try flat-spinning it from an inverted stall, it's wild).
The only thing you might want to do is to tie-wrap (zip-tie if you are a yank) a thin piano wire reinforcement to the plastic undercarriage, which will stop them from breaking on a very sloppy landing. Also keep an eye on the rudder hinges, they will fail eventually, but are a cinch to fix.
You need a fair bit of speed to maintain a knife edge due to the rounded fuselage. Low speed handling is impecable.
Hint, if you are going to spray paint it, do it when its new and not after you've covered it in oily crud and flys.
If you have a bigger engine available (.60+) or want to move up, then try the Jupiters big brother (the Carosel), its superb.:)

RE: RIPMAX JUPITER
 

Thanks for reply
Have now built one fitted witha 65 four stroke ,had to put a fair bit of
lead in the tail to balance.I agree at low speed it is very stable and its
good in breezy conditions. Do'nt know about the single bolt wing fixing
though.... have you had any problems? good tip on the landing gear
will do.

fly well.

RE: RIPMAX JUPITER
 

The wing-bolt is designed to shear if the wing pivots on it. I have never had one break yet. You will have difficulty finding an alternative because it is M7.
I have put my jupiter through some fairly violent manouvres, and nothing has broken yet (except wearing out the rudder hinges, and busting a couple of undercarriadge legs). I did'nt like the pull-pull rudder setup, so I used a solid carbon rod on one side only, which may have helped wear out the rudder hinges.
I would estimate that I have put in about 200 flights on the plane, and I now use it for teaching my son to fly.

If you are doing the undercart mod, then all you need to do is bend a piece of piano wire into a flattened U shape and secure one leg of the U to each plastic leg with a tie wrap at the top and bottom. The plastic legs will always break only where they meet the fuselage, and although they are only a fiver a pair, Ripmax quite often doesn't have them in stock - and in fact its cheaper to get spares sent direct from modelfly in Italy. Keep an eye on the fuel tank stopper screw, mine became loose after a couple of years and started weeping.

How does it go with the .65 4-stroke, it sounds like fun ?

RE: RIPMAX JUPITER
 

Hi
with the 65 fs in front its very fast perhaps to fast .I have to fly on quater throttle
it will go vertical for ever, it does become very twichy with any manouvers
done at speed. I also have a world models rambler 45(have a look at photo) with the same engine
now that flys like a dream at any speed, maybe the wing profile on the jupiter
has something to do with it . I will see how it holds up .