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Archive for September, 2011
Posted by A Useless Geek | Sep 27, 2011 @ 01:45 PM | 12,775 Views
So, I was cutting out wings for a pile of Pinkstars and ended up with these two cutoffs that looked like moth wings. Instant "brain" (as I like to call it) storm: a slow flyer that uses big, fat wings. How original. Here's what I ended up with:

Span: 880 mm
O/A length: 784 mm
Mass: 168 grams
Motor: Turnigy 2204-14T (19 gram, 1400 KV)
Prop: GWS 8x4.3 EP slow (EP-0843)
ESC: SS 8A
Servos: hexTronik HXT500 x 2
Rx: OrangeRX 6 channel, minus useless plastic casket dead weight

The surfaces are almost completely 6 mm Dow Protection Board III. The fuse is 1/2" (actually 14 mm) Pink Foamular. 3M Extreme tape holds the whole airplane together, particularly in the back where I used no spar embedded in the fuse and paid the price for that. I actually broke the plane in half by holding it up from the tail surfaces. After using foamed-up yellow Gorilla Glue to put it back together I added tape to hold the tail end stiffly into place. Duh!

So, now I've got another plane to loan out to people trying to learn to fly. I'm not really happy with the stall characteristics of this plane, so I can do one of two things to fix that; either add a KFm2 step on the top side to make it fly slower and have gentler stall, or cut the wings back to a Skinny Boy configuration (there's plenty of meat on the wings to achieve that shape) and have the plane actually fly a little bit faster, but with easier handling characteristics. I don't know which approach I prefer. In either case I ain't gonna be the one flying this plane a whole lot.