New Wheels for the Old Bird

Hello all,

As you know, if you have been keeping up on my posts, that I have been trying to get used to using the landing gear on my Wild Hawk.  In using the landing gear, I have noticed that the wheels do not work very well on the rough surfaces that I have as runways.  My Dad's place has a lot of grass, dirt, and gravel.  While my landings have been successful on these surfaces, the wheels really plow in the gravel and dirt and catch on the grass.

So I decided to change the wheel size in the hopes that it will help ease landings and take offs.  Because I did not want to wait, I went down to a local hobby shop and purchased a nice pair of 2 1/2 inch diameter wheels.  They are light weight plastic rims with foam tires and almost as light weight as the original ones are.  At least they do not seem to weigh that much more.

Carefully twisting off retainer

Comparing old and new wheels

It did not require too much effort with a pair of needle nose pliers to take the retainers off of the axles.  I did take care to not damage them as I did not have anything readily available to replace them if the would not go back on.

Close up view

How it looks on the plane

The new wheels had slightly smaller axle holes and so I needed to do some reaming and working on them to get them to go on.  They go on alright now, but they only just barely spin without too much effort.  This should have gone better, but I could not find the needed drill size in my tool box. I could have used some sand paper on the axle, but I couldn't find that either.  Oh well, close enough.

Now it's of to some test flights, or take off and landings.

Thanks for stopping by my blog and please post comments, good or bad.  Be sure to come back and check for future posts.

Vindication

Hello all,

After my last flying experience with crashing my father in-law's Wild Hawk, I needed something to redeem myself.  As chance would have it, the following week was beautiful flying weather and my father in-law had repaired his plane, so I worked on scheduling another outing over the weekend.

When I woke up on Saturday, the wind was blowing like a tornado!  No flying today and most likely not tomorrow either.  It looked like it would be another week before we would have an opportunity to fly, and me an opportunity to redeem myself.

Amazingly, Sunday morning was as calm as could be.  Perfect flying weather!  I quickly scheduled a time with my father in-law to go flying.  He picked me up on time and we headed to the flying field.  And by flying field I mean the open field near my house.  We quickly but carefully unloaded our planes from his car.

I noticed that my father in-law had done a great job of hot gluing his plane back together.  It looked great!  Everything was straight and clean.  You could hardly tell that I had crashed it and broken the whole nose off.  We were too anxious to get out and fly so I forgot to take any before photos.

After several unsuccessful attempts to launch his Wild Hawk himself (short runs into the ground, but no damage!) he asked me if I could try.  The pressure was on to not crash and destroy his plane again!

I was in luck and his plane took to the air beautifully!  The pressure was coming down.  It took a bit but soon enough I had it trimmed out and flying around nicely.  I handed the controls back and my father in-law flew the plane for a minute or so before getting into trouble and handing the controls back.  I regained control and handed the transmitter back to him again.  He was flying around nicely and then started to bring it down some.  Before we knew it, his plane was headed to the ground without enough time to hand me the controls.  I have to admit though, that I don't know if I would have taken the transmitter back this time so as to not be the one to crash it again.

Well, even from where we were, we could see parts fly when it his the ground.  Ouch!

Here are the pics I did take of the results.

Father in-law headin out to the crash site.
He's there, look close.

The gear and most importantly, the coffee.
The plane without the damage is my plane.

Yeah, bad crash

Ewe, wing arch is separated too

The tape did not help much this time

Well, my father in-law has shown that he is really good at fixing planes so I'm sure that he will have this one flight ready soon enough.

I hate to say this but I flew my plane from ground take of to landing with no issues what so ever.

Thanks for stopping by my blog and please post comments, good or bad.  Be sure to come back and check for future posts.