Back to flight, the tale of a wrecked Isaacs Fury

[Anyun]

Here are some photos of the almost completed model. There are just a few small scale details remaining plus one rather large, rotating detail at the front end 

The weight has been creeping upwards relentlessly, and is now around 11 grams. This will not be a lightweight peanut, weight w.o rubber will probably be around 14g. On the other hand it is fairly large for a peanut, so I think it should manage.

/Andrea

[Anyun]

The Isaacs Fury has a rather simple painting scheme, being all silver with white registration letters. The ones on the wing are large, but the ones on the fin are quite small and would be difficult to cut out by hand. As we have a laser cutter at the model flying club, I thought I'd use that to cut the registration letters out from a white decal sheet.

As the decal sheet has a shiny surface that reflects light, cutting had to be done from the back side of the sheet. Even so, the laser cutter didn't find the task easy, and I had to use a scalpel to manually "finalize" the cuts. Still much easier than cutting without the help of the laser though.

What I hadn't considered, and actually didn't discover until it was time to apply the decals, was that cutting from the back side meant that all the letters were mirror imaged compared to reality The solution turned out to be simple, apply the decals wrong side up! I was a bit surprised that this actually worked, but with some decal solution the seemed to set on the surface without problems, and colour was exactly the same as on the right side 

In retrospect, what I should have done was to pre-paint the decal sheet with some flat white so that it could be cut right side up 
(In the photo below, the sheet is back-side up and letters hence non-mirrored)

[Anyun]

I had drawn the tail registration so that the all letters were connected to the lines above and below, the idea being to apply everything as one single decal and then paint over the small connecting strips.

This didn't work out as it was totally impossible to handle the connected letters without them curling up, catching each others tails and becoming a tangled mess. So in the end I cut them out and applied them one by one - doable although rather fiddly and time consuming.

[Anyun]

A Peck propeller was attached, and then off to the indoor flying session.

[Anyun]

The first tests showed that the model was a bit tail heavy, it flew in a sort of semi-stalled way while crabbing with the nose outwards. Some nose weight (giving a final weight w.o. rubber of 15g  ) and a bit of downthrust solved this, but as the plane got higher it had a tendency to straighten out when power ran down.
It was saved from demolishing itself against a table by a fortunate catch, after which I decided to do further trimming outdoors.

In any case I'm quite happy with the outcome of the trimming session, the model survived unscathed and does seem quite promising in spite of its weight 

[Jmk89]

The circle radius in the left-under-power trim should usually widen as the turns and torque reduce.  This is usually a good thing since the tighter turn under higher torque should help to suppress the tendency to stall under power.  The downside is that the glide circle is often wider to the left still (or even to the right and wide).  Which is  not good indoors - but then with scale models indoor, and indeed duration models except gliders, the glide is pretty much negligible.

[Anyun]

Yes, that's right. One way to improve things indoors might be to use a slightly less powerful rubber motor to keep power level more even all the way to the floor (i.e. prevent it running out of power while still in the air).

But first some outdoor tests. With its relatively high weight, this model might be more suited to outdoor flying in any case.