How to setup a brand new Wild Hawk

Hello all,

"Thinking out of the box"

There are people who have expressed an interest in how to best setup their Wild Hawk out of the box and there are those who complain that their Wild Hawk is a piece of crap and does not fly.  The information that both people need is the same.  There are several configuration updates of a stock Wild Hawk that are important to make it the good flying plane that people love.

This is what I would do to setup a brand new, out of the box, Wild Hawk:

Glue tail surfaces
While the double face tape used to secure the tail surfaces on the Wild Hawk is adequate and will hold the parts together for quite some time, it will come loose.  My recommendation is to just glue it up from the start and don't risk them coming loose in flight (yes, I have experienced this).

This shows the elevator flush with the end of the tail spar.

The first thing that needs to be done is to remove the double face tape.  If you skip this part, you risk your parts coming apart as your gluing will only be as strong as the tape.  Taking the tape off is not easy, but can be done with just your fingers.  Using tweezers would probably make this task much easier.  Now that all of the tape has been removed, its time to glue things up.  It's important to glue the elevator in first and them add on the rudder.  Take your time with this step and make sure the parts line up.  The elevator should line up at the tail end and not the front edge like it might seem.  If you don't line it up this way, you will risk the movable surfaces hitting they tail spar and not moving properly.

Re-position the battery

I don't know if it can be clearly seen in this photo, but the battery
us upside down.  It will be rotated counter clock wise and slid
forward as far as possible.

This modification require the removal of the foam ridge at the forward most edge of the battery.  This piece of foam it not that easy to remove but it can be done without too much trouble.  Once this is removed, the battery can be placed back in upside down and with the power wires still in the side cut out for them.  Since the Wild Hawk is notoriously tail heavy and does not have a proper center of gravity (CG), this is the minimum that must be done to make this plane flyable.  This does not resolve this plane's CG issues, but give you a good head start.

Don't install the landing gear
While you're learning, you will not need the landing gear.  Don't even bother installing them, they will just get in the way.  Just make sure that you are flying near a nice grassy area and learn to belly land your Wild Hawk there.


Tape up fuselage
This is an important step to help make sure that your Wild Hawk is as rugged as possible.  I have a whole post dedicated to this and it can be seen here: How to tape a Wild Hawk


Tape up wings
This is another important step as well in making sure that your Wild Hawk is as rugged as possible.  This step is also covered toward the end of the above blog post link.

Balance for CG
This is an important step in making sure that your Wild Hawk is as flyable as possible  I like my Wild Hawk leaning toward the nose heavy side and so I have my plane setup to balance at about 2 1/4 inches from the leading edge of the wing.  This is my CG and is just forward of the embedded wing spar.  A lot of people have theirs set for a CG of 2 1/2 to 3 inches from the leading edge.  This will require the addition of weight to the front of the plane.  I started by literally taping washers to the nose of my plane.  This worked fine and has worked fine for others that I know.  I decided to do something that I felt would be better and more permanent for mine.  What I did was to tape fishing split shot to my plane nose until the CG was right again.  Then I used my solder iron to melt some holes into the nose to hold the split shot.  When this was all in place, I used hot glue to secure it all.  I have a post here that shows how I did this: Weighted Question.  This post shows how I made a CG finder: CG Finder

Now your Wild Hawk should be very flyable and ruggedised.  If after all of this you are having issues flying this plane, the problems are not with the plane.

As usual, 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.

Weighted Question

Balancing on my CG stand

OK, the wings are fixed and ready for flight testing.  As I prep all my stuff for the next available flight time, I see that there is another issue that should be resolved and cleaned up.  Until now, I've been using a stack of washers as a nose weight to balance the CG (Center of Gravity or balance point) of this plane.  The Wild Hawk is notoriously tail heavy and needs much attention to get the CG much forward of the center of the wing.  After much research I have come to the conclusion that the CG point should be between 2 to 2.5 inches from the leading edge of the wing.  After moving my battery as far forward as I can without cutting more than the battery retaining foam, I still needed the weight of three 1/2" washers to balance out at about 2.25 inches.  This was OK, but they were just stuffed into the compartment with the battery and could come out in a crash.  Also, if I used a different battery (LiPO) they did not fit in as snug and were usually not enough weight.

Just about 2.25 inches

New position for the battery to improve CG.
(This is an old photo)

So I decided to take the opportunity to make a change.  I had seen someone on the Internet use a fishing "egg" sinker to balance their Wild Hawk, and out to the garage I went to find my tackle box.  I came back in with a few old drop style sinkers that my late Grandfather had made way back in the day, and some newer smaller pinch style shot weights.  The drop style I estimated at being 1/2 and 1/4 ounce while the shot were probably about 1/8 ounce each.  Now the Wild Hawk that I had seen with the egg style sinker just had a hole drilled into it and the sinker hot glued in.  I did not want to do this and I also wanted to be able to change the amount of weight installed so I could add more when using a lighter battery.  I accomplished this by slicing a wedge of foam out of the top of the nose and then boring some holes down into the foam to make room for the sinkers.  I used my modified soldering iron to create the holes with the idea that the melted foam would actually provide for some stability in the nose and hold the weights better.

Holes bored in with solder iron

With the NiMH weights

After some experimenting I was able to balance my Wild Hawk at the point I wanted, 2.25 inched from the leading edge. This was with the original NiMH battery and the two drop sinkers and four shot weights.  I made the holes for the shot weights deep enough so that I could add more later.  I found the "more" amount to be 5 of the shot weights to give me the same CG balance point.  I hot glued in the first set of weights and made sure there was room for the "more" weights.  To hold everything in I just used some fiber strapping tape and taped from the nose over the top of the piece that I cut out.  This worked out just fine in practice.

With the "more" weights

Now for the test.  I finally got some flight time and the plane flew great with the original NiMH battery and I had no issues!  The wings held up great too and showed no signs of bowing even pulling through a loop!  After flying until the NiMH battery was dead, I switched to my LiPO battery.  I opened the front hatch by pulling back the strapping tape and dropping in the extra shot weights.  Then I closed the hatch by sticking the tape down again.  I flew this one till dead also.  Even with a few crashes I had no issues with the nose weights!  I am very pleased with these two new mods!

For some added fun, here are two vids of my Dad flying.  First he's flying my brothers Wild Hawk and then his own Wild Hawk (O'l Hickory).

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

Flying in the wind

After complaining about too much wind and not being able to fly, I was now waiting for a chance to fly with wind.  Yeah, I wanted to test if it would make much of a difference flying in the wind with ailerons.  So, finally a chance to fly and a day with wind.  About 8 to 10 mph.

I started with a full charge on the stock NiMH battery and tossed the aileron equipped Wild Hawk into the wind.  Wow, it flew great!  The ailerons really made a difference if keeping the plane in the air.  I continued to fly and enjoy playing in the wind.  I did notice that one drawback to flying in the wind is that you can only fly into the wind if you have the battery to do it.  I had to bring the plane in long before I normally would have while I still had enough power to bring it in.

So my flying in the wind was a success and I had a great time.  I was so eager to fly again that I went our as soon as I could.  I was having a great time and even decided to try a few loops.  Good thing I only tried one though because as soon as it pulled full Gs, I noticed that the wings had an odd angle to them.  I put the plane through a few more maneuvers and noticed the same odd wing angle.  Oops, time to bring it in!

Servo label nicely glued into the cutout!

Well, I brought the plane in a little too aggressive in an attempt to keep the wings in one piece and lost an aileron servo.  No big deal, and it will teach me not to hot glue servos in on the side with a sticker.  The bond is only as good as the sticker glue!

Wing crease right about where the window divider in the back groung meets the wing

Ok, so upon inspection, I found that the wings were both starting to kink and flex right at the line where the wing spar ends and the aileron servo cutout and aileron cutout weakened the wing.  Another learning experience, watch out where you make alterations and  where the stress points are!

Now I need to figure out how I'm going to strengthen my wings so they don't crack and give out during a flight.  That will be my next blog.


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