This is my FliteTest Blunt Nose Versa Wing RC plane in the days followings its initial, day one, maiden flight. During the maiden flight(s), there were no crashes and it flew perfectly with no trimming required whatsoever. I was so relieved that it went so well. Of course, who was I kidding to think that I would not make stupid mistakes, crash the plane, and suffer the humiliation of seeing hours of my work become creased and damaged? The beginning of the video answers that question.
The video really took life for me when I found and put the Angel Olsen, Sweet Dreams song in the sound track. The song reminds me of music from something that would work in a Quentin Tarantino movie. I especially like the sequence of reflection shots. Among other carefully timed events in the video, watch for the synchronization of the music to the motion of the wing and its sun reflections. I really like watching for details such as these in videos and how slowing or even stopping video can reveal things you would never notice. For instance, on the second crash at the beginning of the video, I purposely froze my image for a split second because it was just too coincidental that it happened to even catch me in a frame or two.
I've applied a lot of techniques I've learned on FliteTest and elsewhere in making the build. Specifically:
Tape Covering strategies and kissing tape technique for trailing edges from Ed at Experimental Airlines.
I used a hobby iron for beveling and tapering the edges of the foamboard instead of sanding or cutting it. Shaping the foam with the iron allows the paper, and the strength it provides, to remain with the foamboard. All trailing edges, including the winglets,were tapered by pressing a hobby iron set to ~330F. against the edges to form the desired angle.
The inside trailing edges of the wings were beveled with the hot iron so they would come together at a more eye pleasing tapered edge instead of being squared off. There's a picture of this at the tail end of the video. There is likely some aerodynamic advantage to this too, but whether I'm seeing any benefit from it is hard to tell.
In the video I was using a turnigy NTM 28/26 1200kv motor, turnigy basic 25A ESC, 8x6 APC prop,& turnigy nanotech 1800mAh battery, I have since installed a Turnigy 28/36 1100kv motor and a 9X6 APC pusher prop. This set up is better and enables a sustained vertical climb. I suspect an even larger prop would give more power such as an 11x4 or 10x5 but I'm not going to experiment for now.
I have also removed the flight test control horns and replaced them with much taller horns. The Flight test horns would work with good servos, but the Hextronic 900 servos I used had some gear slop in them which was amplified with the short height of the FliteTest horns. At high speed the wing would pitch down from the gear slop and that was no fun. The larger horns got rid of the affect of the slop.
With the current 28/26 motor, plus a Mobius camera onboard, the Wing needs about another 153g or 5.30z of weight up in the nose. Total flying weight with camera is around 910g.
If I make any changes it would be to increase the size of the winglets. It tracks ok for flying but when filming video, there is some yaw oscillating going on that is corrected with more winglet surface area. See Red20RC.org website for details.
Enjoy
