Well, I've done it, I've ordered my first airplane. I went and bought the Graupner Mini Piper ARF, Hitec Focus 3 FM with 555 receiver and 2 HS-55 Servos, Graupner SPEED 300 PLUS motor control, 6 Cell 1000 mAh NiMH battery pack, and Graupner Ultramat 5 Peak Charger should be shipping out tomorrow. Any specific things I should be looking into on this one and my equipment? I can't wait to get started. I've seen the reviews on the Mini Piper, it looks pretty cool for a beginner. I chose it over one over the GWS Slow Stick FD and GWS Tiger Moth. All seem to be pretty good it seems for a beginner like me.

Is there a club or at least someone with some experience you can meet with?
You also might want to post over on the "electric beginners" forum.

I'm a beginner with the mini piper too and I love it. It flys easy in calm wind and is fairly easy to land, even for me. If you can get some simulator time or an instructor, do that because you'll have less epoxy lines in the end. And be sure during construction that you have the horizontal stabilizer and everything else straight (don't ask about what I did) before you epoxy it, otherwise it will want to turn one way or the other. By the way, you can use the excess snakesleve to make a good tailskid (see here )

A few things about flying

Don't fly in the wind!! This thing is very light and will get away from you if you do. Don't get impaitient, I did, wait for a perfectly calm day for your initial flight unless you have help (by the way, if the ribbion on the transmitter attenna is 15 degrees then wait for another day). Again, don't get impatient and fly in the wind, unless you want to fly backwards .

Test the controls before launching, make sure when you pull the elevator control down, the elevator goes up and vice verse. Make sure when you turn left, the rudder goes left when viewed from behind and vice verse (again, don't ask )

Fly in an open, and very open field. This helped me a bunch because I wasn't concentrating on not hitting the obstacles, I was concentrating on flying. Even if they seem a reasonable distance away, Imagine how tight of a circle you will have to fly to avoid them, you want a lot of room until you get good.

Take off at about 60% throttle, otherwise it will porpoise up and stall. Still, be prepared to add some down throttle.

And, be very gentle with the controls, don't move them to their extremes (except in extreme situations ). Move them smoothly, and with the rudder, don't apply too much rudder. Take it up to altitude and get use to babyhandling the controls, make a few circuts, trim the controls, then use all your concentration to land. It needs very little controls on the sticks when landing, it is sensitive.

Don't get scared to death that you will crash, it happens to all of us, and this plane is very repairable with epoxy . Wonderful plane, hope this helps to let you have a scarless mini piper ..

Thanks for all of the advice. I've flown the plane a few times in very light winds here in Oklahoma. It's hard to find a day here with little or no wind. I had one nasty crash, the plane nosedived into the ground. The motor was shoved back through the fuselage, the fuselage and wing were both broken into two pieces. It was definitely a severe crash.

However, the plane is very repairable with epoxy. I've got it all back together, but now I've noticed now that the plane seems to veer to the left on takeoff. It looks like looking downward from above that the motor is skewed from centerline about 10 degrees or so to the left. I'm pretty sure this is what is causing the plane to veer that direction. I can't compensate for it with the controls. I'm thinking about doing some major rework of the motor mount area on the plane on the left hand side. Any ideas? Advice? or Tricks for this?

Hello, from a friend who's had many Piper crashes!

I've had a few nasty ones just like you describe, where the motor was pushed back into the fuselage a generous amount. In my case, portions of the nose were generally cracked and split open a bit also.

You're right; this does change the down- and right-thrust angles somewhat. Ten degrees to the left sounds a little much, though; it should be pointed right a few degrees.

Here's the question - have you epoxied it back into place that way? If so, I think you'll have to _carefully_ break it loose again to move it around. How bad was the crash? Since the motor sits in a pre-formed cylinder, I would think it had to wallow around in there very badly to get that far out of line...

What I usually do is re-glue the motor in and try to re-form the nose at the same time. Fill in any cracks or splits with epoxy, or plain white glue works well too, and use small quick-grip clamps and/or masking tape to close up any gaps and reform the nose as you also glue in the motor. That usually gets it pointed back in the right general direction for me.

If the motor gets pushed too far back into the fuse, you can screw some long electrical screw into the motor mount holes in the front of the motor to help extract it. As a matter of fact, some people have used these holes, and a piece of thin lite-ply on the nose, to mount the motor, instead of gluing it in. If you're having trouble getting the thrust-angle right, you may consider a similar fix.

I've contemplated fiberglassing the nose of my Piper. It looks pretty rough from previous crashes anyway, and I'm wondering if that would be a good reinforcement...

Dan.