SOME OF OUR MEMBERS PLANES

CVRCF BLOG

This blog is for our members to tell stories, jokes, looking for parts or just about anything related to radio control. If you have something you would like to add to the blog, send it to the webmaster and it will be posted here, provided it is RC related and the language is clean.

I am Brian and I do have a story that I think is interesting enough to post. One day I went to Hooked On Hobbies to buy some glue and I saw an airplane up on the shelf that had a sign on it that said they had a 10% discount. It was a larger airplane than I usually have which is something I think I need to start using, I like the looks of it, it had long tricycle landing gear on it so I figured I could put some large wheels on it and hopefully be able to land it and taxi it back closer to my table. At least that’s the dream. I haven’t been able to do that with any of my current airplanes so I said what the heck and I did something I never do which is to buy something without researching it, just totally on the whim. It’s called a Pulse15e. So I took it home and started putting it together and in the evening I googled it to see what people were saying about it and I found story after story about the canopy coming off during flight. People were putting stronger and stronger magnets on the canopy trying to get it to stay on, with no success. Then I saw an article written by a mechanical engineer who had purchased one of these airplanes and found out about the problem and decided to analyze it. So one of the questions was wondering about was how strong is this fuselage. So he put the plane on the table and he pushed down in the middle of the fuselage right on top of the canopy and the fuselage flexed a couple inches and the canopy popped off. So he decided that the fuselage was the problem not the canopy. So after thinking about it he decided to reinforce it with some carbon fiber strips. He cut slits down the middle of the rails under the canopy which are only about a quarter of an inch thick and he cut some slits along the bottom of the fuselage. Superglued in some 1mm x 6 mm carbon fiber strips with gap filling CA and let it sit overnight. He came out the next morning and the fuselage was very much stronger and there was no problem at all with the canopy. So I decided to do the same thing. I looked at the top of these quarter inch rails under the canopy and decided I’m gonna have to use an X-Acto knife to cut the slit. And so I did and it turned out to be 7 mm deep. I tried putting the carbon fiber strip in but the slit was way too narrow so I got out my box cutter and made the slit wider. Then I tried it again. Perfect, the strip is in the slot it’s all the way down to the bottom and there’s about a 1mm gap up on top that I can just keep filling up with gap filling CA until it’s full. I came out the next morning and it was already incredibly stronger. So I flipped it over and did some slits on the bottom. When I was finished the fuselage was plenty stiff enough but I cannot get the canopy to stay on. I haven’t flown yet but I got a think that was a huge improvement that needed to happen.