Rick Tee

Found a nice plan for a Cap 232 40 size, currently in the process of scaling it up to 90 size. The plan shows no side or down thrust is this correct?

Had one of those mounts came with my Aresti 40, binned it and fitted a proper mount. One member of our club found his engine kept coming loose. Engine alignment is fairly critical though the amount of movement allowed with that type of mount it unlikely to be sufficient to cause a crash, but enough to make the handling poor. If your not comfortable or confident with the mount ditch it and fit something else. You can buy an incidence meter to check engine alignment and wing incidence, something that's been on my shopping list for erm a long time.

I set mine up as near as pos mechanicaly then fine trim with end point adjustment. Flight idle is then set with the stick fully back via EPA. With a new engine which may not idle reliably slow enough for landing, i just set the trim four clicks up for flight idle and bring it back the four clicks on final. Once down i use the engine cut switch (Futaba trans) to stop the engine, that way i don't mess up my trim pos. The JR works a bit differently, it memorises the trim pos, i pull the trim all the way back to stop the engine and one click forward returns it to my preset position, either way its a kill switch.

But but it's so ugly.

Thanx for the info Timbo, feel like i'm making some progess with it at last. Ordered my first leccy model Seagull 2200 plus ESC and 9.6v 3300mahr NiMh from ebay just £14. Should be nice for those balmy summer days at the power field. (Hmm probably should have put this in a  new thread, kinda hyjaking here, on the other hand is relevant to OP i guess.) 

High speed low passes and the jumping granite rocks of darmoor put pay to previous Hawks, but i love the model so much i always have one in my hanger (got a half built fus ready just in case.) Mods i've made to the original include building the fus with 1/16th ply sides (darmoor is hard on models), a foam wing +4" on the span, really can't be bothered with built up wings these days. The first one was literaly built out of the scrap box, many pieces spliced together and carried out to the hill on the back of a motorbike. A friend built one after he saw how well it flew, we had many hours of fun dog fighting with them. Thanx for the design, it's given me a great deal of pleasure over the years and amazingly it out flys some of the new high performance foamies, altitude, roll rate and speed. Never fails to put a smile on my face and always gets comments from other flyers. Got some piccies of the last build if i can figure out how to put them on this forum.

Yeah i'm sure your right, misscalaculations on prop, motor, or battery pack i guess are the main causes and the occsional duff pack. Not sure about pack sizes will check next time im up the field, which doesn't look like anytime soon with the weather forcast. Fairly sure even the little foamy jets are using bigger packs then 2000mahr as one guy paid £70 a pack for the foamy twister jet (upgraded to brushless) though that would be nearly 12months ago and as i said prices seem to be coming down all the time for leccy stuff. (When i said pop i did not mean literaly explode, i think the safety features prevent explosion unless subjected to extreme abuse, they tend to be rather bigger after the flight then they were before and U/S.) As already mentiioned not got my head around the electric stuff, the numbers quoted with brushless motors make no sense to me at all yet. If i have this right you need 80w per 1lb for say a trainer type aricraft. So converting a standard 40 size trainer to electric weighing approx 5lb gives 400w, if the pack is 11.1v thats 36A, 2000mahr erm been a while but i think this would give you around 3mins airtime. Please correct me if i have made any errors, trying to get my head around this stuff. Electric flight has come a very long way, i remember the days of large heavy accumultors, very light builds and very short flights. Last weekend i watched a 40size scale chipmunk converted to electric fly for 10mins and perform aerobatics. Next time i see him i will ask what battery pack he is using.

Tutor 40 and the Calmato are the best trainers i've flown so far, they both perform well in windy conditions and will go well past learning to takeoff and land giving you an introduction to aerobatics.

Hmm building with cyano shudder! Cling film works for me, but i don't build with cyano.

My 2ps worth, been looking at electric over the last year or so, though i trained as an aircraft electrician im finding it complicated and confusing, only just begining to see through the murky haze. It's also a lot more expensive to get started in then IC. Typical IC trainer, engine, radio, starter etc cost around £300.  Which ever way you go first aricraft needs to be a trainer type design as big as you can afford. Small aircraft are much harder to fly, things happen quicker and at a lower altitude there's less room for recovery. An ARTF electric glider maybe a good place to start with leccy, many come with the motor pre installed and require much cheaper NiMh batteries. You can afford to make mistakes charging without blowing them up, unlike Lipos which (at least at my site) tend to go pop regularly and at £60 + a go not exactly cheap. Though electric stuff is coming down in price, setup and on going costs are still a good bit higher than IC and turnaround is much longer unless you have spare battery packs.. That said it does have great appeal, clean and convenient.

Where to start, I live in Plymouth Devon, and am a member of the Eddystone MFC, a small fixed wing club whose site is situated on the coast. I fly both gliders and powered, have been flying RC off and on for 34 years. My interest in model aircraft began when i was at school, flying chuck gliders then building rubber powered models from KK kits followed by control liners.  i prefer to build from plans and have recently started designing my own models, though i do have 2 ARTF's a  Hanger 9 Aresti 40 with a Saito 56 FS (took a long time to sort this model but it flys really well now, highly recomended) and a Seagul Pilatus PC9 with an Irvine 53 well built, very easy aeroplane to fly which looks great in the air. Gliders; i have a very old Sandpiper trainer type slope soarer/thermaler, a  Venom foamy and a Rivington Hawk (MkIII) built from a free plan in RCM&E. Hanger is a bit depleted atm as i had a bit of a break and only returned to power in 2006. My first own design is a trainer type built from the cardboard box the PC9 came in with a home cut polystyrene vaneered wing. Fitted with an SC46, it flys very well and has had a lot of air time. Current projects are a middlephase, a Cap 232 (found plans on the internet and scaled them to 90 size) and working on a design for a 90 size patern ship. 

Best bet would be to put the 27Mghz gear back on Ebay and try to get some of your money back. i started RC having done rubber powerd and control line, around 30 years ago. Self taught with a Kamco Kadet and 27mghz gear. Many crashes later, mostly due to radio failure and interferance, i quit for serveral years untill the 35Mghz gear came out. Since then I've had only one crash in 20 years (last Xmas) due to radio failure/interferance, the rest have been erm pilot error. The aircraft i crashed at Xmas is an own design trainer built from the cardboard box my PC9 ARTF came in with a home cut polystyrene foam vaneer wing and painted with Dulux white emultion. Low cost hehe.

Me too, gief.

MB5 a lovely aeroplane, have it on the back burner for a build one day, did manage to get hold of a free plan on the internet. Out performed the spit and was easier to service/repair due to its modular design. If i  have it right it was not developed as jets were on the drawing board at the time. Sadly the only one built was used on a firing range. Though i did hear of a project team building one in the US.

I too use solarloc but have also found breaking the shine with fine silicone carbide paper helps to keep edges down. Also as Eric says make all overlaps downstream so the airflow can't lift them or use strips of solar trim to seal them down (good trick for ARTF's.)

27Mghz AM (not come across an FM version) was and is still in use for all forms of RC models. It is prone to interferance, when CB first hit the UK market it pretty much killed the 27Mghx gear and downed a lot of models. It's still legal to fly/drive models using this equipment and some low cost models come complete with 27Mghz gear, but definatly not recomended particularly for aircraft.  AFAIK it would be illegal to operate a radio station on 27mghz as the frequency is alocated to RC models.