jlong34016

My Feedback: (1)

Does anybody have an opinion as to the advantages of using separate elevator and ailerons with this model verse elevons? If elevons are the way to go do they need to be full length or just partial. If you are not familar with this model it is basically a flying wing with a pusher engine which sits in the body of the plane and the prop arc goes thru the wing. Kit uses three control surfaces and i think two will be better. Having elevons in the prop wash should give better control at low speeds, right? Especially if you need to throttle up in a hurry.

VoughtF4U

My Feedback: (1)

I used elevons on mine. Flew fine. Saw another one with the stock set up and it flew fine too. Not much difference that I could see. I used elevons because the servo and pushrod setup was easier for me. I just built a servo hatch in each wing with one servo instead of the stock setup with the servos in the center of the wing running the flexible pushrods.

jlong34016

My Feedback: (1)

Did you use full length elevons?

VoughtF4U

My Feedback: (1)

I took the three pieces that are supplied for the control surfaces, cut the middle one in half and glued the two pieces to the seperate outer ailerons. This gave me two surfaces, each half the wing span. So to answer your question, yes, they were full span.

I had a magnum 1.08 on mine spinning a 14x8 prop. The planes seems like it would fly on anything from a weak .61 up to a .91 ducted fan. It flew great, but I had some problems getting off the ground. Because of the orientation of my gear (the nose gear being shorter by a small amount than the mains) it was hard to get it to rotate.

Make sure when it sits on the ground that the wing has a slight amount of positive angle of attack. Mine would have to build up speed with me holding full up elevator, then when it reached the magical airspeed, the nose would jump off the ground and the thing would rotate at least 60 degrees nose high. It would start a zoom climb and keep flying until you could lower the nose some. Never was a problem, but it was an unusual way to take off.

The ones I have seen with a slight positive angle of attack on the ground had a normal take off where they could rotate at a lower speed, and float off the ground real nice. Landings are cake, it slows way down and keeps flying no problem. Keep the nose high, float it in and touches down real soft, just watch your prop clearance. Fun airplane, you'll like it.

jlong34016

My Feedback: (1)

Thanks for the info. on the gear and prop. I am going to run a ys91 with three blade 12x8. Did you play with CG at all?

VoughtF4U

My Feedback: (1)

I set the CG per the plans and it flew fine. I did fly it a couple of times with it farther forward and farther back. Farther forward basically just decreased the sensitivity of the elevators, but only slightly. Farther back didn't do much too it, but I never moved it back very much. I had another delta once and if you moved the CG back too far it would snap in a turn and spin a couple of times before recovering.

Don't worry much about stalling this one. With the CG set per plans, the thing will fly with the nose really high and just mush through the sky. You have a lot of control authority the whole time and if it gets close to a stall the nose will drop and it will immediately start flying again. The nose generally falls striaght forward, but every now and then it might drop to one side or the other with no more than a 30 degree change in heading. But same as above, as soon as the nose dropped some it would start flying again.

I did manage to get it into a deep stall once resulting in a spin. You have to really manuever aggressively to get a deep stall. I didn't expect it to stall since all my previous experience should it would just drop the nose. Basically it went into a real loose spin, more of a gentle downward spiral. I tired several control inputs to recover but it never reacted to it. I thought my pushrods had popped loose or my battery failed. It slowly spiraled into the ground with the power off. It scrapped the nose cone and punctured a hole in the covering, but no structural damage.

After repairing the covering I tried the same thing. Basically I could only get it to stall and spin about 25% of the time when you really concentrated on it. It would spin and spin and spin with little chance of recovery. The only way to do it was full power and full down. Once it had some speed, then you could stop the spin and pull out. Moving the CG back some made it easier to do this, but it was still really hard to spin it. I wouldn't worry about that though, even if it does do that and spins into tall grass you should have no damage.

If you are not too far along in the building stage, you could think about adding some spring air retracts. The ones I saw with retracts looked a lot cooler and flew a little faster. All in all it is a great plane, I am sorry I sold mine!

miken96-RCU

Ever think of putting retracts on it? I am asking because I plan on building mine for distance flying. I believe with a .91 or mabye a 1.2 4 stroke and a 50oz jeul cell, I can get about 70 miles at 45mph out of it. My calculations are very primitave, but I believe it can be done. We flew one for 34 miles at 45MPH that has a 2 stroke 61 and no retracts. Just wondering if it has the room for retracts since I have yet to build one myself!??


TIA

VoughtF4U

My Feedback: (1)

I had mechanical retracts on mine. They were easy to install and would have worked except the legs were too long to get the prop clearance you needed. The thing would really wobble on the ground. I think if you used a little beefier set of air retracts you would be better off.

I installed the nose gear in the fuselage, retracting forward. The nose gear normally is attached to the same former that has the wing dowel, on the wing side. I attached mine to the forward side of the former in the fuselage that the wing dowels go into. The mains were placed in the same position as the fixed gear mains would be. I just cut two plywood doublers for the ribs to attach a plywood plate that held the retracts. Plenty of room, only thing to watch out for is the length of the mains and make sure they have enough room to retract, mine about touched in the middle. Place the retract body out as far as possible in the wing to help with this.

Mine had plenty of power with a 1.08 2-stroke and 16 oz of fuel in the fueselage. You should have decent power with a .91 4-stroke and as much fuel as you want. There is lots of room in the fuselage for fuel and the wing is deep enough you could put lots in there too if you have a pump or something.