Actually Ed, my post was an attempt at sarcastically pointing out the folly of doing all that extra work, when his power system is already proven MORE than adequate for the task. It flies like a warbird ought to; it doesn't need to be a floater. I would not encourage Kelvin to cause himself all that extra work just to save what I would agree would only be like 3 to 4 oz tops. The airframe, out of the box, with the slight mods he made to Spitty MK I, certainly didn't seem to hinder it's flight performance based on what I saw at SEFF.
My wish is that all ARF conversions should fly so well.

Keep the original covering, Kelvin. You've already proven that shelf paper flies pretty well.

Rick

Originally posted by ElectRick
Actually Ed, my post was an attempt at sarcastically pointing out the folly of doing all that extra work, when his power system is already proven MORE than adequate for the task. It flies like a warbird ought to; it doesn't need to be a floater. I would not encourage Kelvin to cause himself all that extra work just to save what I would agree would only be like 3 to 4 oz tops. The airframe, out of the box, with the slight mods he made to Spitty MK I, certainly didn't seem to hinder it's flight performance based on what I saw at SEFF.
My wish is that all ARF conversions should fly so well.

Keep the original covering, Kelvin. You've already proven that shelf paper flies pretty well.

Rick

Sorry Rick, I missed the sarcasm
Yes, anyone who saw it fly at SEFF will agree that the extra work would (other than possibly for better cosmetics) offer only minimal payback (in this case) for the effort involved.
Ed

Ed,

Its an estblished fact that the covering use on the Kyosho Spitfire will begin to peel back over time. Kelvin did not experience this due to the "short" life span. (see rcuniverse for several threads on this).

Fuel or battery has very little to do with the peel back. Its the nature of the "sticky paper" they used.

Does it look good with it on ? sure.

Is it a lot of work to peel off and recover ? That depends on the covering skills of the individual.

Will it look better ? Based on the skills Kelvin has demonstrated, I am sure it will. It also gives him the oportunity to pick a specific squadron to model after.

Will it save weight ? I think if you use something like Oracover, for sure. Is the weight savings the main reason ? No. This is the scale modeling forum. Scale modeling and attention to detail is paramount here.

Just my 2 cents.

Nick

Thanks for everyones posts on re-covering. Dereck the tips on saving the markings are great.

I think I will keep the standard covering and make it a project later down the line if the covering starts to peel away. That way I know it will be ready for NEAT. I don't want to have one of those marathon build sessions a week before I have to leave like I did for MWE and SEFF. Too exhausting.

I do notice on the remanants of my old Spit that the brown coloring has faded a little from sun exposure. Natural weathering is taking place.

I may peel off some covering from the remnants of Spit 1 and try to weigh it compared to some Ultracote I have. This would be an interesting experiment.

I'll search for some Kyosho covering threads in RC Universe.

My "Merlin" is back from the repair facilities (Aero-Model replaced the gearbox shaft). The expense was minimal and not really worth doing it myself. I'm still waiting on the receiver from Hitec. It should be back next week.

Ed sent me a DVD of some video of SEFF he took and there are three clips of my Spit 1. I love to be able to freeze frame and advance slowly through the take offs. Everytime I look at the first flight's take off on Thursday afternoon I'm amazed I didn't cartwheel it into the ground, a 90 deg takeoff

Thanks

Originally posted by FAA
Ed,

Its an estblished fact that the covering use on the Kyosho Spitfire will begin to peel back over time. Kelvin did not experience this due to the "short" life span. (see rcuniverse for several threads on this).

Fuel or battery has very little to do with the peel back. Its the nature of the "sticky paper" they used.

Does it look good with it on ? sure.

Is it a lot of work to peel off and recover ? That depends on the covering skills of the individual.

Will it look better ? Based on the skills Kelvin has demonstrated, I am sure it will. It also gives him the oportunity to pick a specific squadron to model after.

Will it save weight ? I think if you use something like Oracover, for sure. Is the weight savings the main reason ? No. This is the scale modeling forum. Scale modeling and attention to detail is paramount here.

Just my 2 cents.

Nick

Nick,
All your points are well taken. As usual, I was looking primarily at the performance benefit ......and didn't see the forest for the trees .
Ed

There is another agenda here Ed,

I am also trying to motivate myself to do the same on mine !

(Its been living in its box for over a year now ! )

Originally posted by FAA
There is another agenda here Ed,

I am also trying to motivate myself to do the same on mine !

(Its been living in its box for over a year now ! )

Ok now we know. I did the retract mod so you can do the covering mod.

Kelvin

I wonder, if the crummy shelf paper peeling/fading issue is so well documented, why Kyosho hasn't done something about it by now? This isn't a new kit. Is it perhaps that none of this feedback reaches the product design or quality control people? Or that no one has actually complained to them? It seems quite a waste of money to have to strip the factory covering off the plane, and recover it with material and labor you have to provide. After all, part of the cost of an ARF kit is in the covering (however cheesy), and the labor expended to apply and finish it.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease, or so I've been told.

Rick

Originally posted by ElectRick
I wonder, if the crummy shelf paper peeling/fading issue is so well documented, why Kyosho hasn't done something about it by now? This isn't a new kit. Is it perhaps that none of this feedback reaches the product design or quality control people? Or that no one has actually complained to them? It seems quite a waste of money to have to strip the factory covering off the plane, and recover it with material and labor you have to provide. After all, part of the cost of an ARF kit is in the covering (however cheesy), and the labor expended to apply and finish it.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease, or so I've been told.

Rick

Has the ready-made model aircraft industry ever shown much interest in what folk want? Mostly, folk buy one - and that's all that is expected. Few modellers revisit a model, regardless of who did the building.

They have some great boxtop designs though

Having seen Kelvin's Spitfire fly, it could have stood being a little lighter - scale models of this size are inevitably faster than scale, there's no real way around that short of building them like parkfliers and always flying in calm conditions. These models aren't built for competition standards of flying anyway - they are more likely to end up grossly overpowered and howling across the field like an odd shaped UglyStik.

Buying lightness with a LiPo pack is probably handier for lower wing loading than recovering. The main advantage of a recover is being able to achieve a far more realistic covering job. If you can find a photo of Old Warden's Spitfire, this aircraft looks much like it would have in WW2, though that's just surface finish - underneath, it is immaculate and as well maintained as any other museum quality flying example.

The big advantage of photos of OW's Spitfire is that they are taken with modern techniques and without a war to distract the photographer!

Does a model Spitfire look good covered in pre-printed shelf paper?

That's a joke, right ...

D

Has the ready-made model aircraft industry ever shown much interest in what folk want?

At the risk of sounding contentious, I can think of a couple examples where it has.

GWS-Mr. Lin seems very receptive to feedback from here, and is (slowly) responding to consumer demand and requests by improving and expanding his line to reflect what we ask for.

The Pattern kit/plane industry- They have always been driven by feedback from pilots, and generally do many design tweaks as an ongoing thing in their designs.

Admittedly, neither of these compares to a giant conglomerate like Kyosho, but hey, you've got to at least try. Silence implies contentment in this case.

Sorry to be off topic.

Rick

I scratchbuilt an A-10 recently and in an effort to save weight I covered it with Ultracoat lite (I guess that's the same as Oracover light in Europe??) and painted it with Testor's Model Master paints in spray cans and with an airbrush. The colors match the Federal Standard colors that the real aircraft are painted in and the flat colors look awesome, plus you get the feathered edge that some camo schemes have. I didn't sand the covering first, I was in a hurry to get paint on before the Best In The West Jet Rally in Chino, CA. The paint did strip away a bit from standard masking tape when I taped the masks in place for the different colors, so maybe a steel wool sanding would have helped the paint stick better, but this could be avoided by just laying the paper masks in place.

With this method you get the ease of heat shrink covering and the look of real paint. You have to draw your own panel lines but in the end the effort is worth it when the paint on the cowling and fuselage and canopy frame are the SAME COLOR. My roomie has the Ky P-40 and the cowling and covering aren't even close in the shade of green and that just annoys me...paint just looks better than the shelf paper. I've got the P-51 I was planning on converting and the pre-printed details are nice but camo colors just don't look as good as with paint.

Another advantage of the lite covering is it will really stretch a lot, much more than monokote it seems, I was able to get it around the nose a long way...having more than two hands helps also.

Recovering would be a lot of work but the paint job would justify it!

Kelvin, I saw your spit fly at MWE and it was fast on final..kinda scary and I wasn't even flying it. The lighter you are the slower you come down final...weight savings helps. An idea I have for the old spit...weigh the parts both before taking the covering off then after, the subtract the after weight from the before to get the difference...might be easier than laying a bunch of covering on a scale with it flopping everywhere....

Originally posted by Ed Waldrep

Recovering would be a lot of work but the paint job would justify it!

Kelvin, I saw your spit fly at MWE and it was fast on final..kinda scary and I wasn't even flying it.

I know re-covering would be cool but I want to try to get this new Spit up and flying before NEAT so I can get the bugs out of it and learn some more maneuvers. After looking at the videos that Ed sent me, I've come to the conclusion that I'm a pretty boring flyer. No I'm not going to knife edge or hover it but I'd like to practice some realistic maneuvers.

Possibly at a latter date I'll recover it and try painting it.

At MWE, I wasn't scared because Gary Wright was flying it On the landings he told me he would land it faster just because he thought it would be safer and the runway was long enough.

I installed the motor mount last night and cut the cooling holes in the firewall. The back of the Alu-emount was slightly bent from the crash but it wasn't noticeable until I started to screw the mount down and one corner was up a mm or two.

Kelvin

Boring flyer/flying?

Even in full scale most of the flying was boring wings level.

What typed of maneuvers beyond what you’ve not no doubt mastered do you think they did during a dog fight?

Turns and dives; not too many loops or other tight maneuvers and these bleed off huge amounts of energy.

Strafing/bombing runs are probably the most exciting show stuff; followed by a climbing victory roll. An occasional loop at mid altitude, or a dive on the field from high altitude is more than you’d see from a full scale show.

If you think WW II Warbird flying is boring wait till you go to jets/EDF; when loosing energy in a maneuver has even worse consequences. This is one of the reasons the A-10 is actually a tough EDF subject – loose a lot of thrust/energy banking and yanking.

WW I had more aeros, closer to what we think of as Slow 3D (w/o hovers).

Lighter is better? I lost 12oz from Short Fuse-Salle when going from 18x3000s to TP7800-5S4Ps (8.25 to 7.5) and find it a bit more work landing with the lighter wing loading. Even moved the CG forward (aft -- not) a bit to heavy it up on final. The 5S still has me climbing like mad and adding a lot of down for high speed stuff.

Keep going as you are; shed the covering in the future only if you want to. I half expected Spit II to have been from a kit; thought NEAT and other E Fly-Ins would have definitely been out of reach.

Originally posted by jrb
Boring flyer/flying?

What typed of maneuvers beyond what you’ve not no doubt mastered do you think they did during a dog fight?

Turns and dives; not too many loops or other tight maneuvers and these bleed off huge amounts of energy.

Strafing/bombing runs are probably the most exciting show stuff; followed by a climbing victory roll. An occasional loop at mid altitude, or a dive on the field from high altitude is more than you’d see from a full scale show.

I half expected Spit II to have been from a kit; thought NEAT and other E Fly-Ins would have definitely been out of reach.

I'd like to practice some maneuvers Gary tried to help me with on one flight at SEFF where you roll at the top of a loop and a 4 point roll in a slight climb. Maybe some large Cuban 8's. I'd like to try some inverted flight, but then the early model RR Merlin would l loose fuel pressure when inverted too long. I'd just like to polish things up a bit, especially landings.

If there was a 40 sized kit I would build it but alas there is none.
My only avenue to a future Spit project is the Top Flight and/or Pica MkIX kits, 24 cell sized models.

I wouldn't mind having a go at the Kyosho ME-109E. I could then have a Battle of Britain show

Kelvin

Kelvin,

You (wifey for sure) probably don’t want to here this; but I think you’re really looking for another model. I too am considering my next project; and maybe need/want/should do a real pattern ship!

An E3D of other 3D planes won’t do what you really want, nor will a Warbird.

There’s nothing like the line of a pattern ship to do great Cuban 8s, etc. Most anything will do inverted passes; but again not like a pattern ship.

Did you like the way Ed’s (I didn’t see it; just guessing) Long Stick flew at SEFF? Or, Jason’s Acro? These are pattern ships.

3D are thick foiled and stubby; so the fly a little choppy. Warbids are stubby with thinner foils for speed.

Sometimes I think I’d like to do a new wind for my FreeStyle so it would be more like a pattern ship rather than 3D.

If you’re happy doing 50amp @ WOT; I really think you could do the .60 Spits on just a couple more cells than your Kyosho; certainly on a 6S4P.