Steering things

Got some more work done last night. The tail wheel retract is installed. This was pretty straight forward as the former is already installed. The only mods here was the former opening was not large enough so I had to reach in and open the upper center outward to fit the cylinder. The challenge will be connecting up the tail doors and the steering cable. The cool thing about the electric converted retracts is the speed of the cycle is very scale like.  

 

 

Ok so here we are installing the vertical fin and rudder. The control linkages are hidden inside the tail so this requires some precise drilling and a good drill press is a must. I just realized I did not get better pictures for this sorry. I will elaborate more on this when I install the servo for the rudder later.  The one thing that is a little frustrating is the instructions (if you want to call them that). I think they were printed on the first run of the kits because the parts described and pictured are not the same as what’s in the kit and the builder must play around with things a bit to get the idea of how it should properly work.  Everything needs to be custom created and installed.  I was not happy with the thin balsa that was supposed to hold the rudder bushing in place so I doubled up on it and made a custom plywood support.  This plane will weight over 40lbs in fact almost 50lbs and even though it’s not going to see heavy G forces as an aerobatic plane there will be some heavy forces pushing against the control surfaces making the connections a possible weak point for failure.

 

 

Tail wheel video

 

 

Next will be the horizontal stabs and all the servo installs for the tail. This is about the point where I get a good idea of some of the parts and accessories I will be needing.  As the list grows a little I am ordering and parts should be arriving soon to keep things moving steady.