Enjoying a late Sunday afternoon flight with my Great Planes Electro Stik.
This plane has been modified as follows:
Stock 11.1v battery replaced with a 3000mAh 14.8v battery.
Stock 40A Silver Series speed control will not work with the stock motor using a 4-cell battery (went into thermal shutdown on the maiden flight) so it was changed to an Eflite 60amp Pro ESC.
Stock ES80 servos were changed to Hitec HS-85MG as the stock rudder servo stripped a gear when the rudder was bumped sitting on the ground.
My plane has a custom wood battery tray so I can change batteries through the hatch and not remove the wing while having the front and back side of the battery secured against movement. The battery goes all the way to the servos. Ready to fly it tops out just over 4 lbs., or over a ½ lb. heavier than stock.
The stock Rimfire .25 42-40-1000 motor pulls 605 Watts at 45 Amps on an APC 11X7E prop. It handles the 4-cell battery with no issues and is barely warm when I land.
5 minutes into the flight there is plenty of power to pull from a low and slow pass into a vertical pull-up at ¾ throttle. Most of this flight was at ½ throttle or less. At full throttle it jumps off the ground. I fly with a DX8 and have the timer set to 7 minutes.
The stock setup for this plane suffers from issues that I have no clue why Great Planes has not addressed. Why did they put such a weak servo into a plane with a 52-3/4” wing span that weighs 3-1/2 lbs.? These are better suited for a 1 lb. plane, not a 3-1/2 lb. plane.
The motor and speed control are not compatible on a 4-cell battery. Tower’s spec page for the motor even says not to use the Silver Series 45A ESC. This plane comes with both preinstalled. On a 4-cell battery it’s not capable of handling (3) HS-85MG servos and power the motor (it was propped down to 35A for that flight) without going into thermal shutdown. If both the ESC and motor are rated for 4-cell, then they should be capable of handling a 4-cell battery and not thermal overload.
This plane also came with the wing sitting at -1.5deg. incidence. I shimmed the leading edge of the stab down 1/16 inch to bring it into 0 deg incidence and stop the excessive diving that couldn’t be trimmed out.
Once the design and production issues were straightened out, this is proving to be a really fun plane to fly. It’ll handle 15 mph winds with no issue, slows down to a crawl as seen in the video (both right side up and inverted), and with a 4-cell it’s wakes up and shows it’s real fun potential.
