Project start: May 2015
FPV Carrier Plane
Recently I've grounded my easystar II, wich I used to fly fpv with. During the last flights I noticed, that the easystar wasn't flying as great as she did earlier. I think it had to do with the weight, also I had a hard time to squeeze all the fpv stuff in the tiny fuselage.
So I decided to build a new plane, with more space and the ability to handle a bit more weight. What I came up with looks like the Maja from Borjet, wich I used as my primary template.
Before I started building, I needed some rough dimensions, The CP70 from
Wayne RC (not available anymore) helped me for that a lot.
I started with the two wing halfs, wich are later getting slided on a centerpiece sideways, so that the plane fits into my car.
I followed the
instructions from Andrew Newton on building the Experimental Airlines airfoil design.
The fuselage and also the rest is made out of some 7mm thick isolation foam plates, wich are better available and cheaper for me than depron. For the fuselage, I glued two layers of foam plates together so give more strenght to the whole plane.
On the Wings it was easy to place the servos flat under the surface. For the control horns I used some broken CF/GFK reinforced HQProps from my miniquad.
On the back, I screwed in the NTM Propdrive 28-26 1200KV Motor that was previously in the Easystar. I only had a 8x4.5" prop laying around, a 8x6" should be more powerful. Eventually I'm going to use another motor, but we'll see.
To have better access to all the electronics, I build a hatch on the top just behind the wings for the X8R receiver, wich is held by velco underneath.
On the left, you can see how the winghalf gets slide onto the centerpiece. The idea of using velcro to hold the wings together I got from Wayne RC. That 8mm aluminium pipe is 1m long and goes about through the half of each wing.
I had to cut two windows in each side of the fuselage to be able to connect the wires on the inside.
The lipos, here 2x 3S 2200mAh get put in a perfeclty sized styrofoam pocket and then stored in the front of the fuselage. For the maiden flight I had only one of the two lipos connected, the other one was just a counterweight.
Looks OK for now, btw. the wings are mounted in the middle of the fuselage.
On May, 24. 2015. I was able to maiden this thing.
The up and down on the first flight comes from the motor, after bending it up like 5-10° so that the back gets pushed down she flew much better. Also the COG needs to be corrected a little.
A little more power would also help for the future, also the wings need to get a little stiffer. But so far a successful maiden flight.
Wing FPV40
