It's Hard to Keep a Wild Hawk Down

As much as I like my Wild Hawk, there are times when I try things that are too much for me.  This time it was flying in stormy weather on Superbowl Sunday.  I just had to go out before the start of the game and get some flying in.  The wind was quite strong and it was just drizzly.  I thought I would have lost it on the launch, but favor was with me and I was able to get in the air without incident.  Once up I found that I had enough throttle to over power the wind.  I used this to fly down wind and then slowly cruse back into the wind.  I drive a Jeep Cherokee, and with the Jeep nosed into the wind, I took advantage of the shelter under the lift gate.  I was able to hover my Wild Hawk just 30 feet out for quite some time through judicial use of the throttle and flight controls.  I had a lot of fun doing this.

Just as I was about to conclude my flying, I took one last flight down wind.  The wind had picked up and I was finding it quite difficult to turn around.  Then it happened.  I was way down wind, struggling, and lost my orientation.  The next thing I knew my Wild Hawk was heading quickly into the ground.  I then saw pieces fly up into the air.

I recovered all the pieces that I could find and headed home to review the damage and watch the game.  Needless to say, I will be performing another full rebuild of my Wild Hawk.  The following are photos of the damage and reconstruction.

From this photo you kind of get an idea of the amount of damage.  Fortunately the wing survived quite well!

This is back home on my table.  I took all of the pieces apart as well as completely removed anything that was hanging together.  I find it easier to re-glue whole pieces together rather than trying to work glue into cracks.

I took everything apart.

I do mean everything!

Again, I found it easier to reform pieces and fit them together by taking them completely apart.  I even pulled out hot glue seams that I did not like and re-glued them.

This time I did not use hot glue, but my new favorite foam glue, Gorilla Glue.  I really love this stuff!  I get a nice strong joint that is light weight.  Also, this glue has the added benefit of expanding to fill voids.

I worked on keeping the pieces as straight as possible, making them into bigger pieces and then putting these bigger pieces together.

Here it's really coming together but I did decide to completely redo the motor mount and give it a more correct thrust angle.  For a pusher, the thrust should be strait into the CG point.

More pieces of foam glued in place to fill in the gaps.

The final look of the motor mount.  Also the nose is back on and some of the electronics as well.

I did later discover that this was just a little too steep of a thrust angle and ended up putting a few millimeter washers under the top motor mounts.

This all took a lot of patience as it does take a lot longer for Gorilla Glue to cure that hot glue and it took some time to take all the pieces apart and remove the old hot glue.  But, it was all well worth it.

I don't know why I did not get any pictures of the completed plane, but it came together nicely and continues to be a fun plane to fly.

So, if you completely trash your Wild Hawk in a horrific crash, never fear.  With some time and patience you can have it in the air again and have it flying better than ever.

Thanks for stopping by my blog.  Please feel free to post comments, good or bad, and be sure to come back and check for future posts.

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.

Motor Mods

Hello all, I discovered that my new Wild Hawk motor is not performing as well as I expected.  I wondered why and after some research I found that others who had made similar modifications also upped the prop size from the stock 5x5 to 6x4 to 6x5.  So, that is my next update.

Ok, ok, I know that the Turnigy 2628/10 1400Kvm motor is a bit under speed for this modification, but for now, its what I've got.

Needs 2 or 3 more mm

Others were successfully using these props on their Wild Hawks so I did not think it would be a big deal and picked up a few of the size I mentioned above.  I tried to install one of these 6" diameter props but, it hit the tail boom on my plane, so I needed an explanation of what I had done wrong and a solution.

After some correspondence with Fishbonez and NJSwede, they said it should have fit, but if it's only a few mm, I could just cut out the foam.  So back to take a look at things.

After looking at my situation, I decided that I should be able to move the screw holes for my motor up enough to create the needed clearance.  After unbolting the motor, this is the view I had showing the alignment marks I used to locate the original mounting holes.

New holes marked and drilled

Ready to mark the new holes

 I added these lines to help layout the new holes directly above those that are already there.  It looked like I should be able to safely move the holes straight up about 6mm.  I marked them out and pilot drilled them with a 1/16" drill bit.

It fits!

Just enough clearance

  Fitting on the motor shows that the clearance is just right.  This is probably closer to the shaft location of the original motor than my original modified location.  This would explain why this prop did not work before but does now.

Original motor location, face view

New location. You can see the old holes

 I like this solution because it was a lot easier than another option I was considering (building a new firewall to add on on top of this one) and I did not have to remove any foam for clearance.  Removing foam for clearance might have actually been the easiest solution, but I've had bad experiences with doing this before on another plane and so I really did not want to do this again.

Now I'm ready to test out those larger props and see if I get any more performance over the old 5x5 prop without burning up the motor or speed controller.  I'll post again with the results.

UPDATE:

The 7" has much broader blades

I really like these APC electric props

I have since flown this configuration and found that this APC 6x5 prop, while much better than stock, was not performing as I had hoped.  I have since taken a 7x5 and cut it down to 6" in diameter and carefully trimmed and re-balanced.  As these APV props have a much broader blase mid section they grab much more air than others.  Most other props have the same blade width for a series of props and the only thing that changes is the length.

I now have all the power that I need and am seeing the performance of this torqueie 1400KV outrunner.  I have also tried this with an 8x4 and with similar results.  See my Wild Hawk vs Wind post for how well this configuration did.

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

Making Points

Well, I've been kind of pushing my father in-law to get an RC airplane, especially since he has expressed an interest.  So he finally said he would get one but was unsure of what to get.  I asked around in the groups that I associate with and the consensus was that a Wild Hawk would be the best beginner RC plane for him.  I talked to him about planes and he was leaning toward getting something that was Cessna like.  He was very close to getting an eFlight Apprentice, but being a beginner, I talked him into the Wild Hawk.  Now the Apprentice is a nice plane and I really enjoyed flying the one I had to opportunity to fly, but, with the chance of breaking props and the motor every time it came down, he changed his mind.  Off to Harbor Freight we went and bought him a Wild Hawk.

I had scheduled a flying day with my Dad (at that great park near his house) and a craft day for my wife and girls with my Mom.  I told my father in-law that if he came, between my Dad and I, we could get his plane all setup and ready to fly in minutes.  He charged the battery overnight and met us at my folks house with his Wild Hawk still in the box.  He and my Dad browsed the farm while I setup the plane.  I stuck all the parts together using the supplied tape (figured that would be good enough for now), hooked up the controls, cut out the foam so the battery could be moved forward, trimmed foam from around the linkage by the servos, added the minimum amount of strapping tape on the full length of the underside, installed the transmitter batteries, checked out the transmitter and receiver, and was ready to go.

We packed up all of our planes and off to the field we went, ready to fly.  Well, we got there and found that the wind had come up and was gusty.  We later found out that the gusts were 5 to 10mph!  Since I had ailerons and more control, I took my Wild Hawk up and flew around a bit.  It was not easy to control but not too bad.  Next Dad took out his Wild Hawk #2 and was able to fly it around.  My father in-law wanted to get his plane into the air but did not want to do the maiden flight himself, especially in this wind.  So, he passed the controls off to me.  I was a little cocky and didn't think much of it and confidently strode out into the field to launch his plane into the air.  I figured that I would get it up into the air, gain some altitude, and trim it out.  After it was trimmed and stable I would hand the controls back to him and wait for them to be handed back.

I gave the controls full throttle and tossed his brand new unscratched plane into the air.  It was flying level just fine.  I gave a little up elevator and corrected for a gust with the rudder.  The plane just went all over the place! Suddenly I was fighting to keep this plane in the air.  About 100 yards out the plane took a final nose dive into the ground.  Pieces flew.  One of the longest walks ever over to the plane showed that after only 15 seconds of flight, the nose was broken clean off.  No more flying for this plane today.  Now the second longest walk back to show my father in-law the remains of this brand new plane.  Ugh, I felt bad.

After getting back and checking things out, I found that I had reversed the elevator controls and had not paid enough attention to notice that it was going the wrong direction!  So much for trusting my plan building skills.

Dad's back yard. Yes, that's a golf tee out there.

Well, how mad could my father in-law be?  At least I'm not the son in-law that divorced on of his daughters, right?!  No he was not that upset.  We returned to my Dad's place and when the wind died down a little, we flew our planes right out of his back yard.  My Dad got his Wild Hawk #2 up into the air and handed to controls to my father in-law and at least he was able to get the feel of things and fly it around a little (he did a really good job).  Now, I would have let him fly mine, but with the ailerons it would have been too much different from flying his plane.

Dad flying his Wild Hawk in his back yard.

Dad flying my Wild Hawk with ailerons.

Now we're waiting for another good day when we have time to fly, and this time we'll make sure that his plane is really ready to fly.

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.

Flying again

Well, I finally got a chance to fly again.  It was still a little windy but I wanted to fly anyway.

The new hinges on the tail worked great!  I love these new hinges!

OK, that might all be fine, but the wind took control on a low turn and I hit full power nose down into the ground.  Broke the nose off of the plane, again.

 Can't really see the full extent of the damage but you can see it's seriously tweaked.  This is also after I spent a good half hour taking all of the tape off.  You have to tape these really good, especially while learning.

 Now you can see some of the damage.

I had to completely disconnect the nose to realy fix it right, so I did.

All nicely glued back together!

 Well, I took the opportunity to do some updates while I was at it.  I decided to do some spoon scoops to try to improve cooling.

This is the nose hole I started with.  This is up front by the battery.

 The spoon cut real easy with an Exacto saw blade.

 I marked the location with a pen so I would know where to place a bead of hot glue

 This seemed like the best place for the exhaust port.

You can see them both installed in this view.  Not real easy to see, but they are there.

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

Hinged Again

Ok, no sooner did I buy the CA glue and the thin hinges, and I saw a video about making tape hinges.  This was the best hinge advice ever!  The idea is that you take strips of tape about an inch long.  These are joined together by overlapping them about 1/4 of an inch sticky side to sticky side.  These are then run from one side of one surface to the other side of the other surface.  Oh heck, this will make much more sense if you just watch the video.  The part you'll want is about 5 minutes in.

 So, here is my progress on installing this type of hinge.

This hinging system is awesome! They move  so freely and have so much more movement.  I no longer have any issues with the tail spar yawing when the servos move full lock.

Well I'm still waiting for he weather to behave and allow for some nice flying.  So far any time I've been able to get out, the wind has been 10mph and higher.  We'll see.

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

Unhinged

So, I want to redo the hinges on the tail.  I had the feeling that the stock foam hinges were too stiff.  This stiffness has been somewhat confirmed when I observed the whole tail strut torquing over when either of the tail surfaces was pushed full lock in either direction.  I also noticed that my rudder (and I say mine because I did not notice this on my Dad's plane) would not move as far to one side as it would to the other. This turned out to be due to the rudder hitting up against the elevator bracket.

What did I do to fix this?  I cut the hinges and shaved them down.  Now I need new hinges.  My Dad's plane had a broken rudder hinge when he got it and we repaired that just with tape.  So my first idea was to use tape.

Because the elevator connector piece was part of the issue with the rudder, I took it out and replaced it with a dowel and opened the gap between the surfaces.  You can just see it in this photo.

Well, it looked good.  They worked ok.  But, I didn't like them.  They made crunchy, tape sticking sounds when moved.  Yeach!  I flew it once like this (well attempted to fly, it was very windy).  So, I pealed the tape off.

I started looking for other hinge methods and found people who were using sections of zip ties.  I looked into this and found several videos that made it look easy enough and like a good idea.  I had some zip ties and so gave it a try.

You can barely see the two hinges in the ruder.  These were really easy to do.  I just lined up the two pieces and used a marker to mark the locations and then used the pointed end of one zip tie to make the holes.  I then used Goop glue to hold them in.

Well I put things back together and tested it out.  Still torques the tail over.  Darn!  These are too stiff also.

Now, I was at my local hobby shop and found some thin plastic hinges that get inserted into a slot and then secured with a drop or two of CA.  So this is my next project.

See my next post Hinged Again for an even better option for thin surface hinges!

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