Aviation MegaThread!!!! | Adventure Rider

With all the recent aviation threads and vast number if armchair top guns here I figured its time for a thread for general aviation talk and interests.

You can post anything related to flight in this thread.

Military/civilian, helicopters, gyros, ultralights, hang gliding, gliders, powered chutes, RC, show us yours/father’s/grandfather’s/neighbor’s/friend’s projects, tell us about your careers in commercial and military aviation, ask questions. Anything and everything.

To start things off I’ll walk you through the construction of the Fokker D.VII parkflyer my father and brother in-law got me for christmas.

To start you have to install the ailerons on the tips of the upper wing. They use these tin pieces of paper similar to thick wax paper, but more fiberous. You slide them into slots in the wing and flappy pieces and put a couple of dabs of CA glue on them, wait for them to dry, crack’em and you’ve got a hinge. (The right side is already done, left is still taped in place.)

Next we attach the lower wing to the fuselage.

There we go.

Now for the rear control surfaces.

To attach the horizontal stab I sliced the shrinkwrap off of the top of the attachment point and peel the shrinkwrap off of the same spot on the stab itself. After tracing the area to be peeled, I used a 20w soldering iron to score along the trace marks and make it easier to peel.

Looking good.

Nicely done.

In between the last pic and this one. I ran into a problem. They didn’t give me enough of those CA hinges. So I took a 15-20min break to think about my options. As I lounged around chowing down on a peanut butter cup. It struck me. The card stock they put the cups on inside of the package is strangely similar to the paper CA hinges. Just a little thicker and nontransparent. So I washed it off, nuked it for 30sec to dry it out and voila! They work perfectly, in fact, I think they maybe stronger than the regular hinges.

Rear controls assembled!!

Onto the electronics!

Gots me a fancy rimfire motor!

Now to solder on some different connectors to the speed controller to match.

What do you think Gramps?

Looks like it’ll work out fine.

Controller goes in along with the reciever and motor.

Motor installed. (Whoa, a little too close.)

A ran into another issue where I needed a special harness to connect the servos in the upper wing to the recievers. After a few days and several failed missions, I was able to swing by the local RC guru and pick one up. Along with a matching reciever crystal so I can use it with my radio.

Unfortunately I forgot to snap some pictures, but you have to install the special harness by using a string already threaded through the wing structure from one servo bay to the other to pull the harness through. Turns out the string wasn’t threaded through properly and I lost one end of it inside the wing. So I had to find a way to rethread it.

Hmm…. Maybe out here in the hobby junkyard?

Ah, yes. What’s left of my Hanger 9 F22.

But I digress, there’s nothing here of use to me.

…Maybe in the garage.

Hmm….

HUZZAH! This’ll work nicely.

Onto the string.

…and through the wing.

Wing servos installed.

But in the process I accidentally knocked one of the ailerons off. No problem, Ill just dig the peanut butter cup paper out of the trash. Cut a few small pieces and…

whoops

*ahem* Well I did fix it, eventually.

Onto the inside servos!

Time to attach the top wing!

Yes. Yes. Its all coming together!

There.

Now for the landing gear.

Almost there.

DONE!

Can’t wait to get out there and dogfight my father in-law’s SE5!

And now I turn the floor over to you folks!