Originally Posted by Jovanx

I almost forgot how well this plane flies when it is not being used as a pack-horse. For the last couple of months it had a 6oz camera that also served as an effective air-brake. I was getting pretty used to how it felt, and then yesterday I took the camera off and, wow, it felt so nimble. I never thought of using that word for the Radian Pro, but everything is relative.

I hear yea, i feel the same when i take the GoPro off!

Nice post count BTW "-_-"

I too took the camera off yesterday. It was amazing how fast she climbs without the Gopro on her back. We had a pretty thick overcast and about a 10-15 mph wind (normal for Oklahoma), so i thought i would take her up and see how low the the clouds were. I was flying at what i thought was a safe distance from the bottom of the cloud and then it disappeared. I freaked out. I had no idea where it was. About 10 seconds later i noticed her lawn darting towards mother earth in a death spiral. Needless to say, I will not be playing in the clouds anymore!

Originally Posted by jro0662

About 10 seconds later i noticed her lawn darting towards mother earth in a death spiral. Needless to say, I will not be playing in the clouds anymore!

Please don't leave us hanging in the middle of a story. It was doing a death spiral and then...what happened...did you save it in time?

I had a similar experience after putting a Power 10 motor in the Mustang. It was the first time I ever flew a plane that could go straight up without slowing down and suddenly it was gone. The clouds were much lower than I thought and I was flying in a park in town and I freaked. I had visions of it crashing and hurting somebody. I cut the power and it eventually appeared out of the corner of my eye, way off to the side of where I thought it should be. Luckily I had just trimmed it for a power-off glide (which I do on all my planes, because any plane can suddenly turn into a glider)

Last weekend, I crashed my Radian Pro nose-in. I repaired most of the damage with gorilla glue, but the fuselage around the cockpit area is deformed as a result of the impact (photo attached). I am hesitant to put the plan in the air in this condition, and would like your opinions. Will it fly? If not, any advice on how to reform the foam back into shape so that the fuse is strait and true again?

NJ

HOW TO FIX WARPS, DENTS, TWISTS OR UNCRUNCH FOAM PARTS
by Ed Anderson

I never crash, but maybe you do. Crashing can crunch the foam of a Radian or other foam planes to the point that the parts don’t fit or it introduces a twist or warp as you try to put it back together. Or it can introduce a twist or warp in the fuselage. I am going to outline a method of getting the foam back to straight or uncrunching parts. This can also be used to take twists or warps out of new parts and it will take dents out of your foam wings or even bagged wings, like DLG wings.

Let’s suppose your Radian, Easy Glider, Easy Star, etc. has a tendency to turn in the air requiring you to trim in a lot of rudder to get it to fly straight. How can you fix it? Well first you have to find the cause. Turn your foamy over and site down the fuselage seam. It should be straight from nose to tail. Or, tape a piece of string to the tail end of the fuse, again inverted and then gently stretch the string to the nose. It should track down the center of the fuse. If it does not, you have a warp. We are going to fix it.

This can happen at the factory, from a fuse not sitting right in the box or from a crash where one side of the fuselage compressed from an impact. This can also happen if you leave a foam plane in a hot car for a long time. Believe me, what you will learn here will come in handy for the rest of your foam flying life.

Heat does wonderful things to foam. It can stretch it, expand it and help straighten it. You can put twists in or take them out. You can use this when making some foam replacement parts too.

Since we are fixing the fuse, take the wings off, you won't need them. Take the h-stab off if it comes off. Tape the rudder so it is straight.

Try to figure out where the warp is centered. I am going to guess it will start behind the wings, somewhere along the boom. Flex the fuse to see if you can get it to look straight. You may have to use something to apply pressure in the center of the curve on the opposite side to get it straight. If you can flex it to straight, you can fix it.

Basically you are going to apply heat to the inside of the curve as you flex the boom away from the curve and a bit past straight. As you apply heat the gas that is trapped in the foam beads will expand. As the beads expand they extend that side of the fuselage making the heated side longer and helping you take that warp out. If this was caused by a crash this will uncrunch the crunched beads.

This goes under various names, but you might hear it called the Elapor soup method as it really became popular with the Mulitplex Elapor foam planes. But it works well with most beaded type foams. Easy Star pilots would crunch the nose of the plane in a crash. They would plunge the nose, Elapor foam, it into boiling water and the foam would expand, thus the soup reference.

Heat Methods.

HOT running tap water - You hold the part to be expanded under the hot water while you shape it. In this case you flex the fuse just a little past straight while it is under the running hot water. The foam beads will expand, extending that side of the fuse. After a minute or two you take the fuse out from under the water, still holding it and let it cool. Then site and see if it took. Go back under the water if needed. As tap water is only 100 to 140 degrees sometimes this is not hot enough to do the job. So we need more heat.

Placing the part into boiling water - this works well for small pieces like a rudder a wing tip or a crunched nose. You can also pour boiling water over the area.

Steam from boiling water sometimes works. Use a BIG pot and make lots of steam. This works well for large areas like wings.

My favorite is using a heat gun/hair dryer to heat a wet cloth or paper towels. Don't let the towels dry out completely. You heat the wet cloth till it steams and starts to dry out. You have the part stretched while you do it, just as above.

BTW this works well for bagged composite wings, like DLG wings. It can take a dent our by heating the foam under the skin. I use paper towels and my covering iron. They just magically disappear. Works well for dents in your Raidan, Easy Glider, etc. here you want to be more focused, so a covering iron or a hot clothes iron is best. Just use the tip to focus the heated area over the dent.

In each case the purpose of the water is to keep the foam from getting too hot and melting. We want to get it up to about the temperature of boiling water, though sometimes hot tap water, 120 to 140 degrees can do it too.

Using these methods I have taken Radians and Easy Gliders that have been broken into numerous smashed and crushed pieces, reshaped the foam and glued it back together with great success. Recently I shredded my Radian while slope soaring. A high speed crash through bare tree branches did a nice job on the fuse. The wings just came and got a few dents, but the fuse was in 5 pieces. It flies today!

Regardless of the method, you want to spread the expand over a somewhat broad area, not a pinpoint. Again, in the case of dents in a wing you want to be more targeted. That is why I use my covering iron rather than a heat gun.

In the case of the fuse we are using as our example, you want to expand the most in the center of the warp curve but you want to extend that somewhat forward and back of the center or you will have to overheat one area too much and perhaps not have enough expansion ability to make it work.

Try it! If you have some scrap Styrofoam or other beaded foam you can try this out for practice. Take a foam drinking cup. cut out the bottom. Now do a top to bottom slice. Use the method above and see if you can take the curve out of the foam and make it flat. You may not get it totally flat but you will see the impact. Note that the cup material is thin so don’t heat it to much at once or you will expand all the bead instead of just the ones on the inside of the curve. The heated beads will get bigger.

When working on a fuse, wings or other parts, be sure you don't introduce a twist as you do this or you will have another problem. But no worry, that can be fixed too.

Clear Skies and Safe Flying.

+1 on that aeajr her is one way I do it with a little carpet steamer

Steming Dents and Dings (0 min 49 sec)

Originally Posted by Jovanx

Please don't leave us hanging in the middle of a story. It was doing a death spiral and then...what happened...did you save it in time?

I had a similar experience after putting a Power 10 motor in the Mustang. It was the first time I ever flew a plane that could go straight up without slowing down and suddenly it was gone. The clouds were much lower than I thought and I was flying in a park in town and I freaked. I had visions of it crashing and hurting somebody. I cut the power and it eventually appeared out of the corner of my eye, way off to the side of where I thought it should be. Luckily I had just trimmed it for a power-off glide (which I do on all my planes, because any plane can suddenly turn into a glider)

Sorry, was still pretty amp'd up. I did save it. Like you I noticed it off to the side and regained control. Took it back up later that day, just not that high...

The list of "Ways to break a plane" is infinitely long, and sadistically entertaining. I was attempting to hang the plane from a hook on the ceiling. The plan was to put the hook through one of the vent-holes in the cowl and have it hang in a vertical position. It slipped out of my hands and landed tail-first on the floor, breaking the rudder off.

I am a strong believer in fiberglass tape for hinges. I use it on many of my planes (a bunch of short pieces with the fibers running perpendicular to the hinge-line) and have never had a failure. Anyway, I decided to try something different that I had been thinking about for a while. There is this plastic sheet that is used to wrap around some brands of lipo batteries. I am not talking about the outer shrink wrap stuff that is thin and brittle and tears easily. It is used as a sheath to protect the foil from damage. It is white, and quite thick and flexible, and very strong. It seems like the ideal material for hinges, and we will see if it stands the test of time.

If you want an endless supply of hinge material just use school binders. The kind you can buy at Wally World for a buck. I used then 25 years ago. Never had one break ,ever. The thin plastic kind are the best. You can get hundreds from one binder.

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Hi guys, thanks for the good thread.
All your advises are very useful.
I made one very long and successful flight without stop, about 1 hours.
Unfortunately with a light crash because of strong gust of wind

Hi Ed
Thank you very much for your good advise.
After little crash of my Radian Pro the front part of fuselage was very warp.
I started to think for new fuselage, but saw your reply in this thread.
Reading your advise I used hot running tap water.
Now I have nearly new fuselage.

Cheers
Krasimir

Originally Posted by aeajr

HOW TO FIX WARPS, DENTS, TWISTS OR UNCRUNCH FOAM PARTS
by Ed Anderson

I never crash, but maybe you do. ....
Clear Skies and Safe Flying.

I found this article very helpful. Thank you.

I also had to smile. For those of you old enough to remember, steaming wings to straighten warps induced while shrinking silk or Japanese tissue was a preferred method! I did it often way back when!

Originally Posted by LNEFAN

I found this article very helpful. Thank you.

I also had to smile. For those of you old enough to remember, steaming wings to straighten warps induced while shrinking silk or Japanese tissue was a preferred method! I did it often way back when!

Silk & tissue was all we had when I started in modeling, but I also remember the first heat-shrink coming along in the late 60's, (which was harder to use than today's version, heavy, and prone to wrinkling). Smaller models, up to 1/2A or A size planes, (36" ws), were covered with Jap tissue, while larger B & C models used silk, (60"-72" ws). I must have inhaled enough butyrate dope in my youth to pickle my brain but I'm still ticking, (sort of)! We steamed to shrink sometimes, but mostly we misted water on the surface to shrink the fabric, when shrunk the surface was hardened & finished with a couple coats of dope. It was actually not that hard to do, but it was more time consuming and required more steps to finish so when heat-shrink, foam and fiberglass grew in popularity it saw the near-extinction of stick and balsa models, (though there are a few hangers-on out there).

Sonny

Hi everybody am very excited as I hav now got a radian pro yay. My TX is a DX7 I have followed the instructions at the begining of the tread and have all the mixes right and they work fine . The problem I am having is the motor wont run I have been on the phone to MF and was told that the throttle trim wasnt right down have checked that tried servo reverse but still no joy. Then took all out of the radian and put speedy- motor into another old reciever in another glider on the old Dx66 and all works fine dont know what is the problem any help would be great as have tried all I know

Originally Posted by Desert flier

Hi everybody am very excited as I hav now got a radian pro yay. My TX is a DX7 I have followed the instructions at the begining of the tread and have all the mixes right and they work fine . The problem I am having is the motor wont run I have been on the phone to MF and was told that the throttle trim wasnt right down have checked that tried servo reverse but still no joy. Then took all out of the radian and put speedy- motor into another old reciever in another glider on the old Dx66 and all works fine dont know what is the problem any help would be great as have tried all I know

I think you need to isolate the problem to a smaller area. I'd recommend sticking with your DX7 and Radian PRO. First thing I'd try is plugging a servo into the throttle channel of the receiver. This will tell you if the DX7 and receiver are working on that channel (throttle channel). You should be able to move the servo with the DX7's throttle stick. If that's not working, look inside the DX7 and make sure there isn't a broken wire to the throttle potentiometer.

If the servo plugged into the throttle channel does work, that tells you that the problem is either with the speed control or the motor. I'd check the programming of the speed control. The suggestion about the trim being set to the low limit is a good one, also make sure the throttle stick is all the way back (down). As a safety measure, the speed control is designed not to arm unless these conditions are met. If you have another brushless motor with approximately the same ratings, you might substitute that for the one in the Radian PRO as a functional test.

GOOD LUCK!
BILL in MO