Last Thursday 3-26-2015, I got six flights on my latest plane, the JD-10. It was a chuck glider conversion, starting with an Air-Hogs-Titan and adding electronics. The star of the show was a Lemon Receiver featuring DSM-X + Stabilization + Delta-Mixing all in one small unit + a small satellite/diversity receiver. Once I got it airborne it worked good.
Other features were as follows:
1 – The Air-Hogs-Titan has wings that are both swept back and have dihedral, probably resulting in a strong self-righting dihedral effect.
2 – The As-Found center-of-gravity for the chuck glider before adding electronics was approximately 5-1/2 inches back from the leading edge of the wing root (~3/4 of wing root), and when adding the electronics I balanced the components to maintain the same center-of-gravity.
3 – After determining the As-Found center-of-gravity, I placed a piece of heat-shrink across the top of the fuselage so that I could repeat the balance point (see picture below). I have used this several times now and it works great for repeatably balancing a plane.
4 – I added left and right elevator so that I could use them as elevons (Delta). I also added rudder mostly for later use. Because I wanted to keep all of my wiring and servos on the fuselage and integrated empennage (tail), and because I wanted to keep the known-good wings clean, I did NOT add ailerons. Of course, these control surfaces used three servos, and I used 9gram servos because sometime in the
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