Battery drain
 

Hi all
In biulding my 4ch 40 trainer I used CA hinges the control surfaces seem to be a little stiff. How do I know if the control surfaces are loose enough and if they are a bit still will they drain the battery too much.
Thank you.

Battery drain
 

Ca hinges do take a little break in time. Disconect the pushrod from the servo and push the rod to get a feel for how hard it pushes. Then connect the rod to the servo and disconect the other end from the control horn.
Push the rod ,with the radio off, to get a feel for how much effort it takes to turn the servo. If you are useing standard servos it should be at least twice as hard to move the servo as it was to move the control surface.
This is not an exact science but should give a good idea. Battery drain should not be a problem.CA hinges arn't strong enough to drain the battery unless the surface is in a bind. I would recomend a voltmeter to check the battery after each flight. This is a good habit to start now before you start flying high dollar stuff. later daveo

Battery drain
 

As daveo said CA hinges do take a bit of time to break in. Disconnect the push rods and just work the surfaces a bit until they free up, which they probably will. Check to make sure you have'nt glued one working surface to another. I hope you used thin CA. The medium will not often not loosen enough to be practical. If all else fails use some debonder very, VERY, sparingly. Emphasis on sparingly.

Battery drain
 

There not binding and the servos are 3002 Futaba it takes much more to turn thr servos. They just seemed a little stiff. 15 years ago they would me a little too stiff for some of the servos. I have noticed many adancements in the radio tech. In 15 years alot has changed.

Battery drain
 

Actually... if the hinge woulda been too stiff 15 years ago... its too stiff today too. Stiff hinges load the servo and drain the RX battery... sometimes suprizingly fast.

If you used anything except thin CA on the cA hinges... you gotta cut them and re-hinge, medium and thick leave stuff in the hinge-line, and WILL cause stiff hinges that will fail prematurely. Its not pretty to see what happens when the aileron is hanging by the torque rod on one wing. (or dangling by the clevice...)

If the CA hinge isn't essentially free after 5 full deflections each way... something is wrong and needs to be fixed. The weight of the control surface (with no pushrod attached) should easilly move the hinges.