Sea Salvage and Restoration

This plane was found by my beach combing friend, Greg.  The servos and ESC (electronic servo controller) were corroded badly, but the receiver, motor, wings and fuselage were mostly intact.

There where a few broken longerons, stretchers, ribs, and leading edge of the port wing.  I ended up striping the entire air frame to reach all the repairs and to prepare the surfaces.  A telescope tripod helped steady the frame.  Tweezers and an ice cube helped release the plastic.  While a hair-dryer only acted to reactivated the adhesive.  A few scraps of balsa and a dab of CA here and a glob of Gorilla Glue there it was ready for sanding.

The battery compartment was missing so I fabricated one by tracing the battery bay and cowl curves.You can't see it here because it's missing.

The elevator was broken on the port side but the starboard side was intact to measure and pattern.  The rudder and stabiliser we both badly broken.  I looked at a few photos from the manual and online, then measured the trapezoidal corrected images.  Measurements from three images matched within 5%, so I used these proportions to recreate these surfaces.

 The fibreglass cowl was cracked and I cracked it even more trying to remove a mounting bracket that was installed backwards by the original builder.  I sanded it inside and out.  Taped on a small piece of fibreglass over the most damaged area and applied epoxy to any exposed glass on the outside.  I use a bit of CA Glue along the edges of my patch to keep it from fraying. After drying, I removed the tape on the inside and applied a thin coat of epoxy.  I filed the outside smooth, filling any pits with Gorilla Glue, drying then sanding smooth.  I coated the entire cowl with a thin layer of epoxy mixed with black iron oxide for pigment.  The tiniest amount of iron powder makes normally brittle epoxy measurably stronger.

Learning to fly

My first time at the stick I took off and landed perfectly.  Ever since then I've threw caution to the wind and ditched as many times as I've touched three points.  I tell myself "these are experimental flying machines not pussy cat trainers." but the truth is that good judgement can be learned, and unlearned.

Learn good judgement here, then fly the surface vector:
Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying
by  Wolfgang Langewiesche 1944

This flying by the seat of your pants with sound old school Newtonian physics.  Also, seriously old school, being written in 1944.  Wolfgang's terminology is kooky, but no more than his knuty 1917 counter part Horatio Barber.

Dan Dare meets Steampunk:
The Aeroplane Speaks
by Horatio Barber 1917

A schizophrenic anthropomorphism of every component in a plane.  You will hear voices after reading the prologue.  Awesome illustrations throughout.  The last bit is rather poetic.  It was intended to brace new US Army pilots for the majestic beauty of flight but it almost conveys a hidden chapter on chronic fatigue.   

F4V vertical stablizer area reduction

I mentioned earlier about modifying vertical tail area to allow for tighter roll.  Here is a picture showing the modification.

The reduction of the stabiliser made this plane rather hard to handle.  What a wild ride this was.  The chequered circles were quite helpful in determining the last know position was over San Francisco Bay.  I wish I could share the video but its "gone over the hill".  Maybe for the better.  It was failure played out by the pixel. ;-(

The observations were:
1. the inverted "V" tail is a roll and pitch stable configuration
2. typically the vertical stabiliser is the roll stabiliser
3. the failure of either "V" tail control surface results in roll instability
4. don't fly when its blustery you'll be down field so far you don't know what even happened
5. cut the power and nose it in; you can build again from the salvaged parts, but only if you can find them.

One problem with this configuration was all the hang time.  It floats and floats and floats on a landing approach.  In retrospect I should've ditched into a shrub, but when you're flying youre flying, and sometimes you just can't stop.  You tell yourself, "One more pass will be the perfect one."

This plane was last seen circling up into the sky in a votex that carried it higher and higher and over the hill, over the highway and into the bay. 

The makings of an Airplane

I like to create mind maps for my ideas.  I think they look cool too.

Early Flights

Originally, I went to the hobby shop searching for a radio to control an RC sailing boat I was thinking about building.

I walked out with a Spectrum DX7, a ParkZone T-28, a ThunderPower 11.1V 30C Lipo battery, and Triton AC/DC battery charger.   The plans to build a boat would have to wait.

Here we are in a early field operation of the T-28.

The wooden structure is the open crate I build to transport this model.  Here is a mock-up of the crate I did over the T-28's identification chart.

 

The ParkZone T-28 flies well and its foam construction can take a lot of damage.

One plane turn to two planes, with the addition of the ParkZone F4U.

I wasn't very impressed with this plane when it arrived.  The starboard aileron servo proved to be bad during the preflight check and the adhesive gluing the Styrofoam fuselage was separated near the stabilizer.  Nevertheless the customer support was friendly and replaced the servo right away.  I glued the fuselage together but the first flight didn't go well.

Oops!  The plane started porpoising up and down from the moment it took off.  Clearly the CG was off.  Anyway we can fix this and did.  Behold the F4V in flight.

 The cowl is a green soda bottle and the tail is a inverted "V".  It flew surprisingly well and looks a bit like a swallow.  Amazingly you can switch directions in a very short radius.

Odd looking isn't it?  This configuration was quite stall resistant.  In this frame from the video, it's mushing along, nose up at just the slowest speed (~12kts) possible to stay in the air.  The video was zoomed in tight but there are some good slow passes at eye level.  I'll try to split out the best parts soon.

It didn't roll very well and was a bit too stable.  So further refinements where made to reduce the vertical tail surface, with disastrous effects.  More on that later...

Nutty Ideas

I've got a lot of nutty ideas that sometimes I get around to realizing.  I hope you find these thought provoking.
-Brent