About A470 Soaring


This is the blog for a few guys who spend their time flying radio controlled gliders, or slope soarer's, from the many and varied slopes around SE Wales.

This usually begins at the northern end of Cardiff, driving north up the A470 up to the Heads of the Valley's and the southern fringe of the Brecon Beacons. But the A470 road continues its windy way all the way to N Wales.

There are many slopes available for most wind directions, the most famous being the area between Nant-y-Moel and Treorchi known as The Bwlch, which has some of the best slopes and flying in Europe with many F3F competitions being held there each year and visited by many fliers from Europe and around the world. At 1500 feet (450m) above sea level, there is usually more wind than not, and certainly more than at sea level.

If you require any further information, are new to slope soaring or are visiting the area, please contact Steve at steve.houghton59@gmail.com . I look forward to hearing from you.

Take a look at Page 2 (look below and to the left here) for Google maps of our most popular Flying Sites.


Thursday 21 January 2016

Moth Build - the final assembly

So the last job to do on the assembly side is to make and fit the fin.

The kit provides two pieces of balsa which have to be glued together. Then the supplied template is laid on top and the balsa cut to shape. The template shows where the balsa join line should be and the direction in which the wood grain should run. Simple!

Except it wasn't simple! I laid the the balsa on top of the template to gauge the position of the grain and join line.


As you can see, there was more template than balsa. So I tried another way.


Nope, that wasn't going to work either. So it appears that NCFM have provided an incorrect size of balsa. And yes, the template did print at the correct size because it also included the wing tip template, and that was perfect.

So my choices were to use the supplied balsa, make the fin smaller and with the grain running vertically instead of at an angle or, make a new fin out of my own stock of balsa sheet. And that was what I decided to do.


And this is how it should have turned out with the supplied balsa.

So with the fin made, the next job was to cut a groove in the top of the fuselage for the fin to sit in. I measured and then used a blade to cut through the X weave tape and foam all the way down to the carbon longeron before widening the cut with a router type tool.

I then mixed up some epoxy and smeared the walls and floor of the groove with the glue. The fin was wrapped in a plastic bag and then inserted into the groove and left it there whilst the glue set.

I removed the fin and plastic bag from the groove and just added a strip of 1" (25mm) X weave tape along the bottom of the fin before inserting it back into the groove.

The fin isn't meant to be fixed in place, in case it has a mid air collision or dodgy landing, in which case the fin can be easily replaced. But the instructions do say you can use some clear tape just to ensure the fin remains in place during normal flying.


So the build/assembly stage is now complete and I'm ready to begin covering.



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1 comment:

  1. Phil21 January 2016 at 17:21

    I like that method of fin retaining....it could be used on Wildy's etc with a bit of modification.

    ReplyDelete

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