Hi Folks,
I'm in the process of helping a mate sort out a second hand Velox he recently purchased. I've got some concerns about some things I've discovered with the airframe now that I'm having a good look over it.

1. When viewed from behind, the elevator is clearly not level from side to side. There's a difference of 5mm from one end to the other!
2. The elevator binds on upward travel before it gets anywhere near the suggested amount of movement. Basically, the hinges have been pushed in too far and it's touching the horizontal stab.
3. The horizontal stab has been glued to the booms and is also higher on one side than the other.
4. There is a 7" crack in the top of both booms, roughly in line with the tailcone of the turbine. It looks like the boom has been squeezed (possibly to pick the model up??) and it's cracked at the top, right in the middle.
5. There is a significant amount of play in the geartrains of both rudder servos. This is yielding approx 4.5mm of slop in each rudder. Unfortunately, the servos have been permanently glued in and have not been taped to allow removal. I've briefly tried to see how successful it would be removing one, but I don't think it's possible without doing significant damage to the skin of the boom it's been glued to.

Am I correct in assuming the out of level elevator and horizontal stab are going to cause major issues as speed increases? Ditto the rudders......flutter perhaps?

The cracks etc can be repaired, but if the elevator and stab are going to be problematic, it might not be worth persisting with.

Anyway, I'd appreciate some of the experienced guys offering an opinion on where to go from here.

MrBonk

Sounds to me that whoever built this Velox did not have much, if any, experience with turbine models.The Velox is a very easy model to put together. Why would you glue in the horizontal stab? you have lost the ability to dissassemble the model. I would try and get new booms and a stab from Feibao and redo the rudder servos. However I would check everything else over first before throwing good money after bad.

John

Thanks for the ideas John. Unfortunately, the booms are also glued to the fuselage and are definitely not able to be removed.

The builder certainly appears to have limited knowledge of RC models in general. The avionics fitout was a complete mess. I should have taken photos before I stripped all the valve gear etc out. The regulator for the receiver/servos is the dodgiest thing I have ever seen in my life. If I remember, I'll take a photo of it tomorrow and post it. All I could do was shake my head when I saw it. There were 2 lipo packs silicon glued into the nose, but no balance taps on either pack! I've removed enough 3-way tee fittings from just the cockpit area to be able to redo the entire model *and* have some left over, without counting the 6 or so more connectors I can see through the rear retract bay doors. The list of fitout issues is extensive......

Given that the booms can't be removed from the fuse and the stab can't be removed from the booms, I'm wondering if it might not just be better for me to strip the remaining gear and turbine out of this airframe and tell my mate to cut his losses on it and start with a new one

sounds like the best plan is to do exactly that.....

MrBonk

I am trying to remember how my Velox went together, couldn't you cut most of the booms off and then sand back the stuck on bits back to the original centre section? You will probably have to drill out the wing incidence pegs and fit new one ditto wing tube. I trust the outer wings are not glued to the booms![]Depend what the cost of the parts is to fix it I suppose. It would surely be cheaper than a new model.

John

That's what I'd do too. Given that the tailplane is not horizontal means that the booms/fins are also going to be out of true...but all isn't lost...as John suggested, carefully take off the booms at the root and go from there. You could always consider making new booms and slab tailplane from balsa/ply...yup, old fashioned, but it still works :-))

Cheers,
Dick
England

Thanks for the replies folks. I'll tell him what it needs and he can decide from there.

Well, the plot thickens.

We've managed to remove the elevator from the booms and then the booms from the fuselage. Unfortunately, he's really butchered the wing root on one side of the fuselage and he's stripped the screw holes in both wing retaining tongues [:@]. To compensate for this, he's simply screwed an angle bracket underneath both wings, bored a hole through each boom and bolted the bracket to the boom [X(]

I've attached some images for your viewing pleasure.

The regulator is a real piece of work. There's a single input with multiple outputs. All the outputs have been tied together via multiple double-adaptors and then into a single JR switch harness

The butchering of the wing root of the fuselage is what worries me the most. The hole goes all the way through the edge of the retract mounting box. So, the bottom corner of the retract mount is no longer there. I think this is probably repairable if the hole was filled up with hysol or something and then re-slotted for the wing retaining tongue, but both tongues will need to be removed from the wings and turned around so they can be re-drilled and tapped [:@]

The plot thickens even further. We just received a new pair of booms from FeiBao, but they don't fit the rest of the airframe [X(] Pix attached to show the issues. I'm lost from here.....I really don't know how to go about rectifying this. I've emailed these photos to FeiBao but received no reply yet. There are some obvious differences between the old and new booms. Most notably, the new ones have the rudders live-hinged, whereas the old ones were mechanical hinges. Ditto with the new horizontal stab and elevator. If I lay a new boom over an old one, the holes aren't in the same place either. It's not far out, but it's obviously out enough that they don't suit the wings/fuse we've got I suspect the Velox we've got is a very old version and had been sitting around for a long time before being sold.

MrBonk

If my memory is correct there is one incidence peg on the boom as well as the holes for the wing tube and the recess for the retract cylinder.Unless Feibao have done a major re-design I would think you could get away with re-positioning the incidence peg in the boom or fitting the incidence peg in the wing root and making a new hole to suit in the boom and glueing in a carbon tube to suit the incidence peg. Even if it's not very neat it will be covered up when the wing is fitted.

John