Hi folks, A couple years back I started building a TopFlite Elder to put one of my vintage 20's in . I had it better than 3/4 complete with pilot , machine gun , guide wires and all the neat little extras. Then along came my baby girl , an addition on the house and more "honey do's " than Carter has little pills so the project sat. I recently decided to get back on it and show it off / fly it at my clubs fun fly next month . Much to my dismay however when I pulled everything off the shelf the instruction book was among the missing.
IS THERE ANYONE OUT THERE WHO COULD PLEASE E-MAIL ME A COPY OF THESE INSTRUCTIONS? I have the plan and can probably finnish the plane but I'd hate to forget something simple due to lack of info. Thanks, Ken

Have you tried Top Flights web site? I believe they will make copy's for a fee. If nobody comes through it's worth a shot.

Captken59:
You might want to try this link [link=http://www.top-flite.com/manuals/index.html]Top Flite manuals[/link] and scroll down to download your manual .pdf

Precision and Consistency

captken

WARNING. The ELDER 20 as built by the plans is virtually un controllable!!!

The rudder is waaaayyyy toooo small! May I suggest you DOUBLE the size by making it twice as wide as called for on the plans, then add a square as tall as the rudder is wide to the top of the rudder? Then it might turn in a reasonable manner.

Then the forward mounted main gear and tail skid are cute but they won't let it turn on grass and they won't let it go straight on pavement. And the long, long, loonnng moment from the skid to the wheels does nothing but make it bounce like a bunny rabbit on landing.

Turn the main gear around 180 degrees and attach what was the rear mount to the original rear mounting point, then add a new hard wood block under the fuselage lower skin where the front gear strut hits under the wing. This stops the bouncing and still is far enough forward to prevent most noseovers.

The only fix for the tail skid is a tail wheel or a stearable skid.

I flew one of these for 5 years and only had fun on it after I made these mods

HTH
Tom

Hey Tom you're scaring me . I've Found the secret place one of my family stashed the booklet, so that's good but I got tooooo much time in building this thing for it to turn into a crash test model on the first outing! I'll be careful of the ground handling traits , but it seems like that rudder ought to kick it around. Can you give me a little more detail on rudder mods? Did you build yours with ailerons? Thanks for your input , Ken

I built one of these back when they first came out. It wasn't an aerobat, but it flew okay, about like my 3-channel Goldberg Eaglet. Very slow with an O.S. 20 FP--I could land it straight down in a 15mph breeze. I added a tailwheel so I could taxi. It needed a long take-off roll--possibly due to the forward-mounted landing gear--but I don't remember any other ground handling problems. In the air it was not terribly responsive, wouldn't do any tricks, but it was stable enough and it looked great. Hardly uncontrollable.

thats kind of what I was expecting, i'm building this to look cool at my clubs fun fly not to do stunts but major tom's post has me concerned. thanks

I've seen one of these built with a filled-out rudder, a big rounded job as opposed to the scalloped flap that it comes with. Looked good and no doubt gave it a lot more authority.

Didn't mean to scare you off. It just needs a lot more rudder to fly well. The stock rudder makes it handle a lot like a parkzone J-3, add rudder and wait, and wait and... you get the idea. More rudder will help it turn when you command it to.

The gear turned around just helps it stop bouncing.

And I appologize, uncontrolable is a bad word, if anything it is overly stable. I used uncontrollable because you can't make it turn in what most people call a reasonable amount of time, it just flys nice and straight. Mine had the now rare HP .21 four stroke, so quiet a lot of folks thought it was electric. It is a very nice docile flyer, just not enough rudder for my tastes.

I eventually added strip ailerons. Even made it more fun.