I said last year that I’d reached the zenith of my model
plane requirements and as such I didn’t need to make any more. But I enjoy
building, so I came up with the cunning excuse that each new model must, hence
forth, replace at least two existing models – this should result in the rapid
rationalisation of my fleet! First to go will be the Ridge Runt and Coyote, to
be replaced by this handily-portable general-purpose slope hack.
You’ll notice that I couldn’t just stick to the plan, I had
to add some modifications of my own devising. I wanted a bigger model than the
Runt/Coyote that would still fit in the car boot or roof box, so the one-piece
wing now comes in two parts with a homemade aluminium joiner. For the joiner
to work I had to adapt Stan Yeo’s very neat all-sheeted ‘egg box’ wing construction
and add traditional spruce spars with D-box webbing balsa. I was mildly
concerned about the additional weight penalty, so I compensated for this by
cutting ‘windows’ in the wing sheeting; this also gives the model a bit of a
‘vintage’ look, which is a bonus in my book. It may leave the wings a little
less rigid, but we shall wait and see what effect, if any, this has on aileron
response.
I’ve started looking at radio layout options. The ‘cabin’
can get very cramped with standard-size servos, battery and receiver. With
35mhz gear you needed to keep the receiver near the front to allow for the run
of the aerial lead, but with little 2.4GHz aerial wires this is no longer an issue,
so I’m putting the heavy stuff up front, leaving a gap under the wing for
ballast and locating a lightweight receiver at the rear. I’ll wait and see
where the C of G ends up and adjust accordingly…
Happy landings,
