I flew mine last Sunday for the first time, off grass. Same problems as anybody else, it hit some spot on the runway on take off and flipped over, breaking the prop and my extra steering servo. As I wanted to fly this day, I screwed the steering arm to the battery tray and skipped the steering ability. Further more I removed the front wheel pant and did a new start. All ok now, she tracks strait on take off and flies really well. Could not test too much as I did only 2 batteries.
Have now permanently removed the extra steering servo and all wheel pants and will add some larger wheels. Will see how this works out...

Originally Posted by Chophop

I'm trying to get to this nose wheel shock for us, I have been having an avalanche of problems lately.

Sorry to hear about the damage, but I do think it is plenty strong for some fairly hard landings, keep that nose up and plant it on the mains only. If you stall it and it hits nose wheel first, especially on rough fields, the nose wheel can dig in and snag.

I saw a full scale Cirrus flying today, ran in and got the binos. It was tricky to see the difference between the GP Cirrus and the full scale one, this model is accurate.

Me too

Lucky you, got one in the family ? I know the feeling.

I wondered about the side stick. I flew a middle stick right handed better than a yoke left handed. The ability to coodinate is there, just more at ease flying right handed, but prefer to sit on the left seat.

And bring me a cup of coffee please !

Originally Posted by Chophop

Lucky you, got one in the family ? I know the feeling.

I wondered about the side stick. I flew a middle stick right handed better than a yoke left handed. The ability to coodinate is there, just more at ease flying right handed, but prefer to sit on the left seat.

And bring me a cup of coffee please !

Nope. We live next to th cirrus factory. Walked thru the front doors and asked

Well, mine is a total loss, I tried while flying, to move a garbage cart I forgot to move, lost concentration and nosed it in from 30 feet .
End of my Cirrus days.

Time to ring you up again!

I have gone through 3 repairs of the landing gear and firewall and with one of those repairs being a replacement of the ferring and wire. I now have a scuffed up wheel pant and glue covered pant and firewall. None of my "bad" landings have been very hard. You pretty much have to do a perfect 3 wheeled landing to succeed, which I have many times but the few I didn't, I paid for it. Needless to say, I have ordered new wheel pants (which you can only order in the set if 3 for around $25) and a 5/32" spring wire (I am going to use a rear wheel pant with my new setup). I will drill out the existing hardware as one of the previous members stated earlier in this thread and I will bend the 5/32" wire to get the correct look. I will have to come up with a new ferring design, but who cares. I love this plane! I have set it up for flaperons and will be experimenting with that next because landings are tough as its hard to bleed off speed with the great wing loading.

Guys: tip:
Put the steering arm on the top of the mounting bracket instead of in the middle. Put a spring on the bottom of the mounting bracket on the wire. Shock absorber.

I thought about that, but there is only about 1/8" protruding from the top of the bracket, and only about 1/8" sticking out from the bottom to the start of the bend. I would have to replace the wire to do that, and it is near impossible to get the bend correct to fit the wheel pant with a new wire.

Pictures attached.

I have removed all wheelpants as they did not survive our grass runway. I also screwed the steering arm to the battery tray and gave up the steering ability. So far this worked pretty good except that I have to re-bend the front wire every second landing.
Any ideas what could be done in order to prevent the bending? Stronger wire? Different bending pattern?

Don't worry about the bending, be thankful it is. Just keep on bending it back till it breaks and get a new one for $3. Look what happened to mine.

But, I do have a tip for you. If you land and you find that the nose pops back up again and the plane skips, here is a mod to fix that. Also shown is a metal gear steering servo setup with a 6" threaded rod and two Dubro easy clips or somthing like that!
I just put the servo in the optional cut out for the elevator servo. I used the farther back hole for the actual control surface servo. Just popped a TPro MG90 in the foorward hole! This works amazing.
Now for the nose gear shock absorber -(someone here did this or tried this I think? Not sure but it works great!)
Put the steering arm on top. Put a spring on the bottom between the fairing and the bottom of the nose gear mount. See pics!
This works amazing! Just take a crappy old pen and steal the spring and slide it on! Try all of the pens you have, so springs may work better than others, some may not fit-etc.
Get a cap head screw for the control arm that way you can tighten it more, and it won't slip. I dont even need a flat spot on the shaft.

In the last 3 days I just started flying my SR22, it has been flown 8 times and it has been great. Thanks to this forum I know to keep up the speed on landing. My other airplane is a FMS 182 and you can just about walk as fast as it flies when I land it, so there is quit some difference between the planes. This is definitely not a beginner airplane. Any way I did some photos of my build and hope to share them soon. After reading all of the posts I had hoped to avoid some of the problem points like the nose gear, I do have a fix for that and it has worked so far, I will share that when I post pics. I am using a gens ace 3300mah 3 cell battery with a 3 blade 10X5 prop that pulls 28 amps at wot. After each flight I check what is left in the battery pack and have adjusted my flight time accordingly. I started with a 5 minute timer on my first battery and am now up to 11 minutes and I think I can add at least 1 more minute. I tested 5 different props and the recommended 2 blade 10X7 prop pulls 32 amps. Anyway lots more to discuss when I get my build info posted.

Just ordered this plane and I hope to have it together by Christmas! Thanks for all the tips you guys have posted so far, and I will post pics and comments as I build it.

I finally had a chance to work on the Cirrus last night!



Me and my brother got the instructions book out, and went to town! The instruction book was very helpful, one of the best I have seen so far,



Took us about 3 to 4 hours to get it assembled.



It is always amazing to me that we can do this in my cluttered plane room!



A Sky Power 45A ESC and a GForce 3300 40c battery puts the power to the RimFire .10 motor and the Electrify ES50 Nano servos.



Still need to "beef up" the front steering, and maybe paint the top side like some of the 1:1 planes are done, and put the stickers on...but she is flyable right now as she sits!



I had the same problems as mentioned earlier with the pins in the wings not in line with the holes in the fuselage, easy fix, and it was only one pin (right rear).
I checked and reglued every glue joint, tightened up the screws in the front wheel bracket (yep, they were loose), and the axle shaft for the front wheel needed a little tweaking to get it just right.
The supplied pushrod for the steering arm to servo was too short (mounted my servos in the rear holes for battery clearence), I just used a longer one out of my parts bin and trimed it to fit.
I used servo extensions for the ailerons and it took me all of 5 minutes for both of them. I tied the string to the extensions, taped the string to the plug and pulled 'em right through.
All in all it is a very well put together plane and looks awesome!
Maiden voyage should be in a week or two because of the crappy weather we have right now, but I am already excited about it.
Ready to fly weight is 47.75oz, or 2lbs 15.75oz.

Am I correct in assuming that when the front wheel takes a hit, that it breaks the balsa that the wheel bracket mounts too? So just reinforcing that should be the best solution right? Any up close pics someone could share besides the ones that are already posted here?