The plane is built around a
section of 'U' channel aluminum I found at Home Depot. The plane
'body' is a piece of 1/4 " plywood with a notch cut out for the engine,
and a hole cut out to cradle the gas tank.
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Here you can see the overall
layout of the equipment on the plane. I used a hitec 555 rx, HS55
for the throttle servo, and HS81's for the rudder/elevator
servos. The SBec is a
voltage regulator that can take an insanely wide input voltage and
provide a stable 5v output. I power it with a 2 cell 800mah
lipoly battery pack.
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I decided early on to make the
airplane fairly aerobatic, so the Steelhead wing cores were glued
together with no dyhedrel, and full length ailerons were
attached. The aileron servos are both driven from the same
channel, but at some point I might plug then into seperate channels so
I can program in some custom mixes on my transmitter. Note the
custom "H" mount for the tail servos... it is made from 1/8
plywood. A 1/16 inch piece of basswood protects the TE of the
wing from the hold down rubberbands.
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This detail shot of the tail
shows the positive incidence I added by putting two washers under the
front hold-down bolt. This reduced the decolage to an appropriate
level, and effectively built in a bit of motor down thrust by virtue of
the fact that the motor thrust line was mounted in line with the
fuselage.
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The 'V' tail has
turned out to be not such a hot idea for this plane. The tail I used
came from an Aerobird Extreme. There have been reports of this
tail failing on the Aerobird resulting in a crash. In a fairly
highspeed pass I heard the "thrum!" of something fluttering on my
plane, and when I landed I discovered these creases in the tail
surface. If I had not used packing tape on the top of the tail
surface I am sure it would have snapped off, just like on the Aerobird.
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