Blue, Pink, Green whatever colour you like Bill!
Yeah! need a name now. All my names are a bit rude :?
So here's the low down.
Basically it flies pretty feckin' good:D
. CoG was set at about 21% of MAC at the start. Ended up moving it forward in subsequent flights. It was very pitchy in the beginning as expected. Elevon movement for elevator is probably 5-8mm max. Became more stable as the CoG was moved forward but more reflex was needed on the elevons. Probably 4/5mm now.
It's pretty quick. Turns fast with no nasty habits. Inverted is good. Roll rate is not bad. Stalls eventually and just flops over. Stall recovery takes a while. Need to try this in light wind/lift.
No problem to keep up with Keith's S15. Hard to tell which was faster. Need to do a bit more flying to find out. He had his ballasted and mine was not (yet!). I say I was about half the weight of the S15
Started with twin fins. Worked good. No yaw issues that I could see. Seemed to track pretty well. Didn't have time to make a center fin so at the slope we just taped one of the fins onto the back. It was fairly floppy but I got the idea. Felt like it flew a bit better with one fin. Roll rate was a little faster too I think. There were some yaw issues but a proper fin thats not flopping about should fix this. I will go with the one fin design I think.
Came out reasonably ridged without trying too much. Pine spar and one little metal plate joining the spars. The blue foam is fairly resilient with the GF tape on top. If I don't plough it into the ground too much it should last a while.
Improvements??
Well the first thing that comes to mind is increasing the pitch stability. The PW51 airfoil is pretty pitchy apparently. I flies good as it is but that few mm of reflex is probably slowing it down. Would like to get the same stability with no reflex.
Thanks to Keith for the filming. Sorry for the quality. It's a still camera not really a movie camera.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/tT-xNSwOc5w[/youtube]
