An electric palm sander is a wonderful thing! If only I’d had one in the 70’s I could have filled the whole bungalow with balsa dust rather than just my little bedroom. Oh and the wonderful smell of cellulose dope… those were the days. And mixing my own diesel fuel… I regularly bought Amyl Nitrite and Ether over the counter in the chemist at just 15 years old! Anyway, back to the build…
After quite a lot of sanding:
Adding the fuselage fairings to the wing roots:
Then the wings had their final sand:
What you can’t quite see behind the winglets is, what was going to be the outer 4 cm of flaperon is now a short section of trailing edge with built-in washout. Will that prevent the nasty tip-stalls I’ve been warned about? We’ll have to wait and see.
To help achieve ‘more up than down’, the flaperons needed horns that were raked forwards. I couldn’t find any for sale so made my own using bits of plastic from an old bucket:
So here she is with her control surfaces pinned on just for the photo…
IMPRESSED David!!
Have to say it does look like a glider, very pretty. Two things, when did you start this model and does your transmitter not allow for different servo throws eg with aileron differential?
Shame to cover it!
John
Thanks John.
I did my research and started sketching out ideas in June and made the rib templates in July.
My transmittter allows for all sorts of programming but the glider was not designed to accommodate it. I think I’m right in saying that to utilise the transmitter’s full capability, each control surface would need its own servo. That’s not what I designed.
Both the flaperons will be connected to one aileron servo which will be ‘slid’ by one flap servo. So the differential I need on both the flap control and the aileron control has to derive from setting up the right angles on the horns and the right angles on the servo arms.
I enjoy the challenge of that much more than transmitter programming.
I get your philosophy David, we rely on technology far too much.
John