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...