Joel
Senior Heliman
Location: Columbia, MS
| I built mine about 6 years ago and don't remember exactly how I built it but I know I didn't use foam safe CA when I built mine and I know that regular CA will eat foam. I used regular (thin) CA and epoxy on the whole thing. Epoxy doesn't eat foam like CA but I wouldn't use it on hinges because its too thick and won't wick into them. I think it had sticks on the trailing edge of the wing which the hinges could be regular CA'd to?.....I think thats how I did mine anyway.
My Duraplane lasted through a lot of cartwheels and stuff like that....you might have to bend the aluminum channel back sometimes, since it can bend in a crash. You can get that 3/4" channel from Lowes or another hardware store if you kill it too much...its called plywood edgeband and is commonly used on railplanes.... you can also get the fuselage which is gutter pipe. If you do manage to break the fuse (I never did) then you should make the gutter pipe the full length and get rid of the aluminum channel sorta like they do here ( http://www.spadtothebone.com ). Be careful not to have the iron too hot when covering the wing because it will make the beads in the foam show through.
I don't know what engine you have but if you find that it has no power to speak of, then you're probably using a Master Airscrew prop.......get an APC. Believe it or not my tower40 which is the same as an OSFP, both of which are no longer made, would not run at anything but full throttle and I learned to land dead stick. Nobody at the field could get it to run until I changed to an APC prop several months later, well then I had way more power and my engine ran great at all speeds. That engine still runs great now with APC's and I tried a MA prop on it about a month ago and it still won't run with one. The only thing good about MA props is that they don't break as easy....can you tell I don't like MA props?
Oh yeah, don't glue the horizontal stab to the floor at 2:00 in the mourning like I did
Well its more than you asked for so I hope its not too long,
Joel |
