8KCABrett

My Feedback: (1)

Here is my 3D Foamy Raven Build thread. (Work in Progess, frequent updates)


Build thread HERE --------> http://www.txsquadron.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2016



Specs:

3D Foamy Raven. "Pro-Kit" Depron with "G-Force Wing" and Carbon Fiber landing gear kit
AXI 2212/34 With Levi's laser cut Mount (waiting on it)
Castle Creations Phoenix 10
Berg 6 G*III reciever
(3) Apogee 830 mAh 3s1p batteries
(4) Hs-55 servos
MPI 2" wheels

psk560

My Feedback: (12)

Great job! Look foward to hearing the flight report on that one. My blue ff raven was the best! I plan on building a few more.

craig

corey11

how long did it take for you guys to get your kits?? i bought a CAP232 from him about 9 days ago, and i dont even know if its been shipped out..i have left about 3 emails asking for a update on when it will be shipped. I know it may take 1-3 weeks, but him not replying to my emails, isnt right to me. If i dont get a reply soon, im going to cancel my order and buy from antoher company who responds to me.

8KCABrett

My Feedback: (1)

Well, he was away for the NorthWest Hobby Expo, and I guess should be back now. . .mine didn't take too long, a little over 2 weeks, though the box was damaged in shipping and there were some missing and damaged parts which I am waiting on. I didn't get any email confirmations until shortly before it shipped, then it it was here in two days. Try calling him in the AM (between his listed hours on his site). . .

Mike Bogh

My Feedback: (14)

Get a grip Corey, Levi was gone from Thursday untill Monday afternoon.
Fer cryin' out loud.

XpastywhiteboyX

My Feedback: (5)

seriously dude, before you start bashing at least get teh facts. It said right on his web site levi was at an expo thursday till monday morning. i have a low tolerance for ignorance [:@] ....

corey11

The answer Brett gave me was just fine.But Mike, and whiteboy, come on. I heard it in the Bretts post, and i dont need to here you guys repeat exactly what he said.

Sorry i dont stay on the internet non stop, and check websites non stop.It would have been easier if Levi told me he wasnt going to be avaliable through those dates...Pretty simple.But o well, i forgive him for not telling me.Its not the end of the world.

Also, on his website, it says he would be back the 4th of Feb. Now, it is the 9th. So he has had 5 days to send a email back..that should be plenty of time right?? Guess ill try one more time

XpastywhiteboyX

My Feedback: (5)

all we were saying is dont bash if you aint got facts....

sideshow

My Feedback: (11)

My Raven kit took a very long time to get...over a month. Many emails went unanswered. It was Christmas and I know they were away for the holidays....it just would have been nice to have had a realistic date. It was supposed to be a Christmas present and I got it January 21st.

That being said, I love the kit and I can't wait to get it in the air. I will be buying another......maybe the Sukhoi.

corey11

Well, i have left 2 emails, and called 5 times, cant leave a message because the mail box is full...Does he even check his messages? doesnt look like it. So, if i ever get a hold of him, im going to find out if i can get it in my hands by the end of next week, if not, im canceling my order and buying some where else

Desertrat

My Feedback: (2)

Corey: I got a Sukhoi from him I ordered before Christmas in mid January. Yes it took a long time, but I offer this - noone here has complained about customer support, and I can tell you from personal experience, the kits are among the best fit and finish for the price out there. Its worth the wait, and you will be hard pressed to get anyone to sympathise or badmouth Levi. If you are that impatient, then settle for an inferior product and move on.

Roger

corey11

Heres the thing, im not a full time plank pilot..i fly helis...so by nature, im impatient. I want it to just mess around with in my court or at the feild.So i would like to recieve it very soon..and looks like i wont.so im going to go buy another plane

Levi_Jordan

My Feedback: (21)

Cory,


Did you see that when you ordered it said 1-3 weeks???? did you say its been 9 days???? I have no problem refunding you if you decide to be impatient.... Now, I've been gone from Thursday to monday, and I get 500-700 e-mails a day.... x 4 days.... I'm sure I'll get to your 5 e-mails soon.... But I gotta tell ya, sending out more e-mails doesn't speed things up. I manufacture all the kits myself, answer e-mails myself and if every person who orders asks for an update on the 3 week wait time 1 week into it..... I don't get no manufacturing done

the Website has been shut down for ordering so that I can get the planes manufactured.... now back to the shop.

I & C Tech

Brett, That thing is really coming together well. What's the bottom of the wing look like? Solid red or did you put some stripes on it?

8KCABrett

My Feedback: (1)

Well, I am doing it nearly to scale of the full scale raven which has a white underside to the wing, there have been sponsor logos there in the past, but I am doing mine based on the current scheme of the Raven. The red curves over the leading edge and goes to white pretty early on the underside of the wing more or less where the curve of the leading edge transitions to the main wing, there is a fan shot photo in my gallery that kinda shows it on the full scale Raven.

I am just taking the time I'm given until the missing parts of the kit arrive to try to figure out how to do the canopy, and the lower blue fuse stripe. A canopy decal would be handy! I sure could use an airbrush right about now. . . about the low blue stripe, the paint I have is Testors Dark blue, and it's not very dark when painted on white foam unless multiple coats are used, which I'd rather not do. The full scale raven has a deep blue/black/purple color on teh Raven graphic, and a flat navy blue for the lower fuse, my raven graphic ended up being mostly black, so the lower fuse stripe will looks a bit out of place as dark blue.

I & C Tech

Brett,

I've been following your thread and I appreciate the time you're putting into it. It will really help me out when I start my build.

Thanks!

I & C Tech

Brett,
The manual that I've downloaded says the pushrods will be made from carbon rod. Is this the setup you weren't impressed with or did yours come with something else? If the carbon is small enough to flex, I may go with the Dubro setup you suggested. Would that be the standard micro pushrod or the "micro 2" system that is the larger gage wire?

8KCABrett

My Feedback: (1)

With respect to the pushrods, mine were CF rod and piano wire. The CF rods are much smaller than those that come on the shockflyers. They are fabricated by joining two Z bent piano wire segments with a thin carbon fiber rod using CA and then covering the joint with heat shrink tubing. The elevator and rudder rods seem rigid enough though those are nearly half the length of the aileron pushrods which are 4 and 1/4 inch long. I shortened the z-bent wire somewhat (much like they look in the manual photos), perhaps if I hadn't done that the aileron pushrods would have been rigid enough. Also, the Z bent areas have a little more slop in them then I like, so I think that going with themicro EZ connectors might not be a bad idea. I am sure that the included hardware can be made good enough for the job, but mine didn't end up that way.

I think the following should work: EDIT to add that no, it won't actually ;-)

http://www2.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin...?&I=LXAZB6&P=M

I & C Tech

Great info. Thanks Brett.

8KCABrett

My Feedback: (1)

Well, after inspection of the dubro rods I see that the thin wire is way too thin for this application unless you used the included plastic sleeve and a guide setup, which I opted not to do. Instead I picked up some .04 carbon fiber rod, some Dubro micro clevis' (for .032 pushrods) and some mini EZ connectors. The CF rod can be glued right into the micro clevis (no metal needed there) and the other end you can either CA a short length of .032 piano wire for the EZ connector, or perhaps drill out the EZ connector a tiny bit for the CF, I tried using just the carbon rod and drilled out the EZ connector. . . this is a nice clean looking slop free setup. I will add some pics to the build thread this evening.

I & C Tech

Very helpful. Thanks Brett. I received email notification that my Su-26 has shipped. I should be able to put all of your experience to work for me shortly!

8KCABrett

My Feedback: (1)

Well, I just got back from the maiden flight, well, two actually! It was sunset and getting dark fast, the park I usually go to had some soccer games going on so I found another one but there was not really any hard surface to land on but I thought I could make do with some shortly cut grass. . . Ben "Hwkmn" was there with me to watch and he got some pics and video though it's all *very* poor quality, he ended up just catching it for me in low hovers to save me form needing to do land on the grass or try a spot landing on a 8 foot patch of concrete sandwiched between rows of trees. That worked out well. It was night so the third battery didn't get used. Based on these two flights which came to about 6-8 minutes each I observed the following:

On takeoff as I pitched to vertical it kept on pitching up, I needed a lot of nose down trim for level flight (the trim lever is about 75% of the way up) and there was very little pitch stability on the first flight. I had placed the battery near the spot to get 3.5 inches aft of the LE of the wing root. . . but I might have been a little aft of that. . .OK. . I WAS aft of that as I left the wheel pants at home and that was enough to shift the CG back closer to 4 inches. Even during the second flight with the battery moved forward a bit most of the nose down trim was still dialed in so it wasn't just a CG issue. I haven’t yet re-checked the CG on it, but will do that shortly. When the epoxy had cured on the motor mount the thrust line looked like it had a little upward angle to it. . .that is proabbly the main issue here, so some shims should fix that up.

Roll response was very good, rolls are very axial with no need for differential or rudder, points on point rolls were nice and precise, the shocky was always a little less crisp and you could see it hunting a little as you stopped the points of the point roll. Roll rate was good, and also unlike the Shocky Edge it seemed perfectly content blasting out consecutive high rate rolls, the tail wasn't playing catch-up that I could see, and the plane didn't look like it was about to break! The axial nature of the rolls made them easily sustainable with little rudder or elevator work required to maintain alt and heading, even at high speed and high rate, I bet rolling harriers will be smokin!!

I did find that in low speed flight the surfaces all needed more travel than I had allocated to them. 40 degrees of rudder gave good performance but twice I fell out of a torque roll on the yaw axis and couldn’t bring the nose vertical very well without adding a little blast of power to transition from high alpha knife edge back to the hover. The shocky had no trouble with this (but might have had more thow), and I don think this will with another 10 degrees of rudder travel dialed in. This is another point that I might appreciate though, as most of the glow 3D'ers I fly need a little help from the throttle in this too. . .and the shocky gave me a lazy throttle finger that didn't carry over to my other planes very well! I am not a fan of the specialty foam designs that depart too much from conventional flight characteristics of the larger 3D aerobats. . . this seems to blend the big 3D/IMAC glow gas aircraft character with the foamy performance extremely well.

This also had a harder time doing anti-torque rolls (to the right) as the ailerons seem to be more shielded from the prop wash than the shocky though I had the aileron travel a little more conservative than it could be. It did them just at a slower rate than I'm used to with the shocky. I also noticed that when right at the stall AoA the ailerons some effectiveness so, again, I need more travel.

The AXI2212/34 would hold her in a hover at 1 ratchet click above half throttle (time to get a ratchetless heli setup BTW) i am still breaking in my batteries so I didn't go much above that yet, though a few more clicks of throttle and it climbed out with plenty of authority.

I didn't want to test for Vne just yet but I did do some high speed downlines and 45s on the second flight with the battery moved forward a bit, and this plane tracked very true with visible stability and smoothness and none of that hunting or twitchiness of the shocky . . .very nice. . .you could probably fly a nice IMAC sequence with this bird!! I might just put my glow aircraft in storage at this rate!

So in summary:

This does not fly like the Shocky. . . it feels like a much larger aircraft. . .it requires a little more attention to proper flying techniques when transitioning from flying on the wing to the harrier/hover attitudes than the shocky did. I needed to pop a little blip of power to help it draw a crisp corner in the pop-ups and if I didn't do that I had to work the rudder a bit to keep the wings level, just like I need to in larger RC planes, and full scale aerobatic aircraft. . . so for me, that is a pleasant surprise. This is probably due to the larger size and weight, and perhaps the unique wing design. It had no coupling at all in knife in both directions, this probably knife edges better than anything I have ever flown in 21 years, and was a much better torque roller than the shocky is, it pitches up and really locked into the rolls, I could hold it steady rolling with next to no deviations on any axis at all, even with my out of practice thumbs. The shocky always seems to be pitching, yawing, climbing or descending just a little bit in my most stable torque rolls. This was really obvious to Ben and he said he noticed that more than anything that it looked like a much larger plane in the air, it was rock solid in the torque rolls, and that it was very precise and smooth. . .and I agree heartily.

I will make some changes tonight, more throws, re-trim the elevator, and move the Velcro on my batteries to get a more forward CG, and I will report back again tomorrow. . . so far I am loving it!!!!



Really bad pics and video will be posted in this thread: http://www.txsquadron.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2016

I & C Tech

Very good news on your maiden. Brett, how long do the extensions need to be for the rudder and elevator servos? Or more specifically, what is the distance between the servo and the receiver? (in case my servo wires aren't the same length as yours) I'm making an assumption that our receivers will be similarly located.

8KCABrett

My Feedback: (1)

I am using 6 inch extensions, and they are the perfect length, certainly not too long as I had thought they might be. I jsut got back from 5 more flights. . . even witht eh wheel pants my CG is still needing to go forward, it is now at about 3.25 inches aft of the LE and it still climbs both upright AND inverted. . .the roll rate is really fast now with the added aileron, but still precise when you stop it. This is a VERY nice flying plane!! you can tell it's a bit heavier than the Shocky types though, and right under the stall AoA the ailerons do seem to becomerather unresponsive unless you blast a little power over them. . . I am not sure that more throw is the real solution, I think throttle managment is the first, best response, as if you are working the power a bit you won't notice this, but if you just gradually fly slower and slower you will hit a spot at the stall where the ailerons sorta fade out. . .I haven't weighed mine yet, but It does hover at 50% power with the AXI 2212/34.

There are a couple pics of the complete airframe now posted on the build thread, and they are a tad better than those from last night but since I shot them they are just ground shots.

FallingWithStyle

Please let us know if it still as easy to enter a torque roll or as stable in a torque roll once you get the pitch trim problem resolved. If you end up moving the cg forward alot, maybe the vertical 3d abilities will be adversely affected...

Clark