How fat should a Zagnutz be?

[BigShark]

This forum really needs a comprehensive wing list with power systems that work. Unfortunately I'm pretty much a tailess newbie. I've built a couple of Zagnutz' out of blue foam. The first two were thinner than suggested by the Gene the Zagnutz master. They flew fine but didn't have the ability to thermal at all. I built another more to the plan and the darned thing looks really fat. The spar is 1.25 in thick at the root. Including the fanfold top and bottom, the wing is about 1.75 in thick. In a 50 in span tapering to a half inch at the tips does that sound too fat? The airfoil is a straight forward Clark Y. the chord is an exact duplicate of the plans below. Any Ideas?

The Zagnutz Site (http://home1.gte.net/texhills/index.html)


Thanks,

Rich

[TheAeronut]

It's not really a Clark-Y, but close enough and it works fine. About your thick wing ZagNutz, the real answer is take it out and give it a try. Since the thick one is the same as on the website, it should fly well. I am not sure how well any of these should thermal. My guess is that they would require a moderately strong thermal to climb - after all, they are not really optimised thermal sailplanes, just nice sport ships.

J.P.

[BigShark]

Actually, I deviated from the typicall Zagnuts plans by printing out some Clark Y wing ribs from Profili. Using those you come up with a much nicer airfoil than just folding foam over a spar. The darned thing just looks fat compared to the other wings out there. I'll see how it goes.