radioflier
May 10, 2004, 04:19 PM
Here's last year's project that I flew all summer. It's a scaled up version of the old VECO Sioux free flight plane from the '50s. I believe it was originally a 36" span plane powered by an .049. I got the plans for this from FLYING MODELS magazine - they called it the SUE R/C. It was a construction article a few years back written by Doc Mathews. He enlarged the plane to about 60", a put a .19 - .25 motor in it, and converted it to 3-channel r/c. His version had a lite-ply fuselage. I made a couple of changes to it, including a mostly-stick fuse.
Weighs 53 oz with a MagMayhem, GP 3.1 gearbox, and 8 CP-1700 cells. Way more power than needed, but this is what I had laying around, and I needed the weight of the battery up front to balance out the tail.
I had trouble triming it out to fly decently - as spec'd on the plan, it was built with no downthrust on the motor, and with a wing incidence of about +5 degrees. With just a little power applied it will gently climb and glide real well, but add too much power and it wants to go nearly straight up and stall!! I put a shim at the trailing edge of the wing and added some downthrust to the motor and that seemed to improve things, but it's still not where I want it. I'm thinking about building a new version with maybe 2 degrees incidence in the wing and a couple of degrees downthrust in the motor, but have a few other projects I'd rather do first.
ron
Weighs 53 oz with a MagMayhem, GP 3.1 gearbox, and 8 CP-1700 cells. Way more power than needed, but this is what I had laying around, and I needed the weight of the battery up front to balance out the tail.
I had trouble triming it out to fly decently - as spec'd on the plan, it was built with no downthrust on the motor, and with a wing incidence of about +5 degrees. With just a little power applied it will gently climb and glide real well, but add too much power and it wants to go nearly straight up and stall!! I put a shim at the trailing edge of the wing and added some downthrust to the motor and that seemed to improve things, but it's still not where I want it. I'm thinking about building a new version with maybe 2 degrees incidence in the wing and a couple of degrees downthrust in the motor, but have a few other projects I'd rather do first.
ron