Saint 1

Not sure my skills are quite up to formation flying but that would be good Andy thanks

I maidened my Impala at the Orme last weekend too! Despite her hefty 1.8kg AUW she flew brilliantly from the off with virtually no trimming. With how windy it was I did have some reservations that the air intakes or tip tanks might have blown off in flight but they were unfounded. Both intakes did detach on landing though but that was the idea. I'll be looking forward to flying her again soon. Last minute checks - Photo courtesy of Dave Gilder:- And away! - Photo courtesy of Phil Cooke.

Just realised I had not added any in-flight photos of my Super Corsair. The first was taken by Phil Cooke at the Orme last October And these next two were taken by Dave Gilder, again at the Orme, last weekend She is a delight to fly and one of my favourites.

It's taken quite a while but finally I was able to maiden my Sea Hawk at last weekend's PSSA meet at the Great Orme. The launch went well (thanks to Harry Twist) and she was soon climbing away, in fact I had to feed in a considerable amount of down trim in order to maintain level flight but much of that may have been attributable to the strong winds we had over the course of the weekend. I did find it to be quite sensitive in both pitch and roll for my liking but managed to limit that with my rate switches. I didn't get to attempt a proper landing because I had a moment of complete disorientation and ended up making an enforced belly flop landing into some gorse. Amazingly no damage was incurred other than a broken pitot tube! I was VERY lucky! Since returning home I revisited my CG calcs and found an error meaning my CG was further back than I thought at around 7% static margin so I have now added another 50g in the nose to bring it forward by 10mm and giving a 10% margin. Hopefully that will make it a little less twitchy in pitch for next time. I have also upped the expo on the ailerons and elevator too for good measure. Hopefully we'll have favourable conditions for our return to the Orme next month and I'll get to fly her again Here's a couple of photos for the record: Launch photo courtesy of Phil Cooke:- In-flight photo courtesy of Dave Gilder

Very nice job Mike, just needs some wings and tail feathers and you'll be done 😁

Thanks for the kind comments all. Stu: I've sent you a pm.

I've finally managed to finish off my Impala, the weather hasn't been very conducive to spraying so there has been the need for much use of the fan heater and hot air gun to help things along, my impatience doesn't help of course! I chose to replicate the colours of a recently restored Italian Air Force MB-326K Impala - registration I-MBCK. I had never attempted spraying camouflage with faded edges before so this was a bit of a new adventure for me. Fortunately, Harry Twist pointed me towards using soft edge masking foam which helped no end and although the masking process took quite a while I'm very pleased with the results. I once again used the Lifecolor Mimetic range of paints from Airbrushes.com. The rest of the detailing is a mixture of vinyl and waterslides and in some places waterslide on top of vinyl. The whole model then had a couple of coats of clear satin sealer to finish off. It turns out that paint and vinyl are heavy, adding another 140g to the finished weight so I probably now have the heaviest Correx Impala ever built at 1790g! That aside, with all the added 3d printed parts and detail I reckon from 6 feet away anyone would now be hard pushed to recognise its humble Correx origins. I'm now really looking forward to getting her maidened... when there's a stiff breeze blowing!

Thanks PDB. That's a very good question. Correx is tricky to get a decent bond to as you say. On surfaces that aren't seen I first key the bond area with sandpaper, then clean all surfaces with nail varnish remover. In my experience wherever possible hot melt glue gives the best bond, followed by EvoStik. When using EvoStik to glue on my balsa edging strips though it has sometimes had some kind of chemical reaction within the flutes and caused the skins to bubble up slightly. As an alternative I have now found that clear Gorilla glue also works reasonably well when bonding to the flute edges. It's not as good as EvoStik when bonding directly on the surface of the Correx though, as I found when gluing my printed wing strakes. I first bonded these with Gorilla glue but then managed to dislodge one so have now reverted to EvoStik again! I have had similar problems with filler. It's ok to use when filling joint gaps where it has good edges to get a grip on but it never adheres as a thin slither over surfaces very well and would invariably flake off after a heavy landing.

Building my Correx planes to look more scale takes on a new dimension. I thought I’d share a few photos and info on another Correx build I have been working on over the Winter, but this one's a little different for me. As you may know already I have built quite a number of Correx PSS aircraft over the past four or so years and over that time have gradually attempted to transform them from the normal vinyl covered 'fun' plane to something a little more scale in appearance and worthy of gracing the skies alongside more traditionally built planes at our PSSA events. This time I decided to turn my attention to the Aermacchi MB-326 Impala. There is something about planes with tip tanks that just seems to make them look so good in the air. The plans for this particular model have been about for years and are freely available to download, along with many others, from RCgroups.com https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?1445391-Correx-PSS-L39HawkF-18FoxxU-2ImpalaA-10SpitfireF4USeaFuryP-51VulcanFW190-free-plans! The construction method has been covered many times before so I won’t go into detail on that. My build is already complete and now ready for a primer coat. The build was mostly to plan other than my usual approach of using 2.4mm ‘Correx’ for the wings rather than 2mm plus a few adjustments along the way to fuselage former sizes and positions to aid assembly. In my more recent builds I have taken to closing off any exposed flutes to improve the look, either with thin ply, balsa or filler and that is what I have done again here. I have also produced the ailerons with a folded piece of Correx rather than just a single 3mm thickness: this not only reduces the amount of exposed flutes but also makes for a smoother blend between the wing and aileron surfaces. The nose is made from a ply cruciform with balsa infill. When I first commenced this build knew I would want to improve on the tip tanks; to plan they are simply made from a few thicknesses of Correx glued together. Plus there were no air intakes either – something else I wanted to add. These were invariably going to be produced in balsa BUT then, mid-way through December I was offered a second-hand 3d printer – something I had been thinking about for some time..... My builds are never going to be the same again! Much of my past career revolved around Cad modelling so before long I found myself downloading some free Cad software and although it was a different package to that I’d been accustomed to I soon got back into the swing of things again….and then there was no stopping me! The tip tanks are HUGE – 400mm long! But after a fair few iterations I had something that fitted neatly over the ends of my Correx wings. For retention I included holes to accommodate both 6mm and 8mm magnets, in case the 6mm ones aren't strong enough. My first attempts were printed flat on the bed and had way too much infill and consequently weighed well over 100g each. After much help and advice from Tim Mackey (Thanks Tim!) I ended up printing the tanks vertically with thinner walls and a much reduced level of infill. This not only produced a far better surface finish but also reduced the weight by more than half, down to a little over 50g each. This was using PLA+ print filament. A test performed by Tim suggests this weight could be further reduced by another half again if lightweight LWPLA were to be used. For now though I’m happy with what I have. With the tanks sorted my next challenge were the air intakes. I opted to make each one in two pieces; a lower piece which I bonded to the underside of the wing with the upper piece held in place by yet more magnets. My thinking here is that the upper pieces will easily detach, should the wing bolts ever shear and cause the wing to twist out of the fuselage, rather than directly impacting the fuselage sides. These weighed a little over 60g for the pair which didn’t seem too bad. A part-pilot and seat added another 20g The particular Impala I’m modelling had cannons so I decided to have a go at modelling and printing some of those too. Trying to create the correct shape to mate to the underside of a folded Correx fuselage proved quite challenging but I eventually had something that fitted reasonably well and weighed in at around 35g for the set. I made a pair of wing strakes which weighed in at under 5g and also made a little instrument binnacle to suit a photo of the instruments I found. This weighed just 6.5g Another feature of the plane I’m modelling is what I presume is some kind of aerial – a hoop-like structure on the tail fin. Recreating this would invariably result in something exceedingly prone to damage in transit so I wanted to make something which was detachable. I ended up modelling some tiny grommet-like pieces that will be glued together sandwiching the tail fin and with suitably sized holes to accommodate some black wire sleeving (with the wire stripped out from inside). A trial piece suggests it should work. Adding all these detail parts (and filler) of course comes with a weight penalty, something in the region of 250g for this build, taking a more normal build up from around 1400g to where I am now at 1650g (fully balanced to the plan CG point and including 50g of nose weight but without paint). Hopefully it’ll all be worth it though! Here are a few more photos of the whole plane as it is currently. Thin ply and filler used to cover any exposed flutes around the exhaust (Not the best place to be adding weight admittedly). Filler applied at the joint between the turtle deck and fuselage Thin ply edging of exposed flutes and 6mm x 2mm magnets to retain the tip tanks...hopefully! Predominantly balsa edging strips around all tail surface edges. Also visible are 2.5mm carbon stiffening rods inserted through the flutes. Those within the fin penetrate down through the fuselage formers for extra rigidity. Hopefully it'll soon warm up and I'll be able to make a start on getting it primered and ready for the finished colours Phil

😄 Thanks John. PSS... it's quite an addiction isn't it, there's rarely a day, or night even when my mind isn't given over to some random thought relating to it. Even my wife won't throw anything away without first asking "might this be any use to you for one of your planes?". Some have it far worse than others mind, as yet I've not crossed the Atlantic 'on holiday' just for a tube of glue 😁

Lovely choice of colour scheme Pete. Looking at Sunday's maiden flight I think I would look at moving the CG rearwards a little if you can, ideally without adding even more weight in the tail. Are you able to relocate any of the radio gear further back at all?

Once again we had a good time at The Orme last weekend for the last PSSA meeting of the season but I decided against trying to maiden my Sea Hawk so no aerial photos now probably until we return in the Spring I'm afraid. There were good 20+mph winds on the Saturday but being from a North Westerly direction it meant either a tricky landing amongst the rocks and gorse to our left or a lengthy walk up to the top where there is a substantial and flat grass area. I flew my Correx BAe Hawk a couple of times and landed that to the left ok and then later on flew my 1/8 Super Corsair. This time I decided to land up top which was great, once I got there! Thanks to Harry Twist for navigating me around the rocks and getting me there safely whilst still flying. As the afternoon moved on the low sun on the landing circuit became another problem and so I decided not to risk the Sea Hawk. More accomplished pilots than me would and did fly their larger planes and land them without incident but equally there were others that weren't quite so lucky so for better or worse I decided to call it a day. Lack of wind on the Sunday made it virtually impossible to fly any PSS planes so that was it for the weekend. So all I can offer you for now are photos of my BAe Hawk and Super Corsair in action and another of me and my Sea Hawk very much on terra firma. All photos courtesy of Phil Cooke.

Thanks everyone, Jan is flattered by your comments. You are right Ace in that it wasn't a 5 minute job, more like a week on and off with much head scratching along the way so producing more is not something she would wish to pursue on a regular basis plus there would be a couple of challenges going forward. Firstly there would be the logistics of her needing access to any aircraft model for the duration and then secondly we haven't been able to source any more of the fabric we have used. I bought it from a place selling roll ends, it has a waterproof outer, foam middle and mesh inner all fused together, I presume, being lumo that it must normally be used for some kind of work wear. It is really durable. Despite us asking on a number of occasions up to now they have never had any more come back in stock. Here's a photo of the material so you can see the construction...

Thanks everyone for the kind comments, hopefully the weather will be good for us at the Orme and we'll get some good aerial shots. I have to share a few photos of the super bespoke protective bags my wife has made to keep it safe in storage and transportation. Now that'll just leave the unsafe bits when I'm at the controls to worry about 😁

The glossing of the fuselage went as well as I could’ve hoped other than having to dash out and get another spray can part way through so it took three cans in total. The finish is more sheen than gloss but I’m pleased with it nonetheless and I was soon able to assemble everything properly for the first time, fitting the elevators and rudder along with their servos and linkages and installing the radio gear up front. I have been on the final page 22 of the build guide for quite some time. ‘covering and final finishing’ – Just four words but they took 5 weeks to complete! All that remained after final finishing was to set the CG and control surface throws. The CG point as specified on the plans is 40mm forward of the stage 7 former which on my build equated to being 82mm rearward of my wing joint leading edge – marked on my joint face by the pencil line in the photo below. I have used another couple of those soft close cupboard door buffer pads to make for easy location of the CG point on the underside. The CG point looked quite a way forward to me on first inspection but having subsequently used the rcplanes online CG calculator for a 2 panel wing (taking into account the faired sections) it equates to about 12% static margin so probably not a bad starting point for a maiden. (10% margin would move it back by around ¼”). As a check I got in contact with John Woodfield to ask if he could confirm whether or not he had subsequently altered his CG away from the plan figure. Unfortunately he had recently sold his Sea Hawk so couldn’t check for certain but from memory thought he’d started as per the plan and then gradually moved it rearwards so I will likely have to do similar with mine. Achieving the plan CG point meant I needed to add a further 185g of nose ballast over and above the 240g I had previously built into the balsa nose giving me an AUW figure of 3.188kg or just over 7lb, remarkably similar in both size and weight to my Correx Super Corsair. I have programmed in 3 rates settings on my ailerons and elevator with the medium setting matching the specified control throws so for the maiden I’ll have the option of either increasing or decreasing the throws in flight if necessary. So that’s it, all I need now are some favourable conditions on the Orme next month, the nerve to let someone throw it off and hopefully sufficient ability to be able to land it safely again. Thanks to all those who have provided help and advice along the way, especially to Phil Cooke and Harry Twist – sorry for bombarding you both with so many questions. Here’s a few photos of the finished plane along with both my Super Corsair and me for size comparison.