Mountain Models Firestorm – Build Log

[Stevephoon]

I have now finally stripped a retract. Instead of the wheel only facing foreward it now can spin when pushed. It does not have a small set screw to hold it. Something stipped on the inside. I may try glueing it back together at some point, but for now I installed the fixed gear. I also covered the wheel wells and moved up to a 2 1/2 in Dubro wheel from the stock 2 in wheel. This was the quicker fix when a little CA did not hold up. I assume that the extra weight of the 4 cell battery helped do them in.

The good news is that I do not really notice any performance differences and the whistling at high speeds is gone. The ground handling is a little better on the grass as well. I'll probably keep this setup at least for the summer. I may try some real Great Planes 10 sized retracts that the plane was designed for later as well.

Steve

ps.. I still love this plane. I have started a NSRCA pattern program at my club so we can start to learn pattern flying!

[Stevephoon]

The good news is that I won a prize at an all electric event at a nearby club. The bad news is that the prize was for whoever put their plane in a tree first....

It was the first flight at a new field for me. An anouncement came that a special demo fly was going to start so all planes should land. I started my approach and badly misjudged the tree line... I found it in some deep thick woods in a tree about 30-40 feet up. The tail was already off. I climbed up as far as I could go and then shook the branch. I then also grabbed an old dead branch and wacked the branch with my plane and down she came....

The good news is it's out. I have not really even looked closely at it, other than making sure all of the electronics are still there.. I'm afraid to.

I can't say how bummed I am.... This was my favorite plane.

Steve

ps. I hit a deer with my car yesterday... It's in the shop. I'm now dreading tomorrow.

[buzzltyr]

Sorry to hear about your FS, Steve. I hope it isn't as bad as it sounds. I know you'll be able to build another one, if necessary, and that it will fly even better for you than this one did.

Mark

[dumo01]

Steve

Sorry to hear about your Firestorm. Mine is still hanging in there, maybe because I have not been able to get it out as ofter as I would like

Hope you kept the gremlins off your back today

[dumo01]

Steve
Regret to inform you that you started a trend.
Put my Firestorm up for the first flight of the evening. Had been flying it about two or three minutes when I put it into a high easy loop. Went up into the loop very nicely and started back down and would not pull out of the dive.
Went into the ground from a couple hundred feet up, had time to pull the throttle off before it hit but not able to try anything else to get it slowed down. Airframe is a total loss as is the battery and probably the motor but will check out the motor. Hopefully the ESC, UBEC and servos will live to fly again
Exam afterward showed that the control horn had pulled out of the socket in the elevator. That failure seems odd after flying this bird for for about two and a half years and this was not what I would have thought was a high stress maneuver, but it was cleanly out of the socket ( not broken off) and this would be consistent with the aircraft behavior. No way to know at this point if it had come out enough that I should have seen it on preflight. Surfaces moved normally and it flew fine ( up until it crashed duh) but I did not specifically check the insertion of the horn into the control surface before I took off.

Guess I will spent some time rechecking all those other control horns I have epoxied in.

May have to consider a repeat build of this one.

[Stevephoon]

Well, the past couple of weeks I've been working on repairing my Firestorm. I started with the tail first. It was a pretty clean break at the former right at the start of the tail except for the bottom side. It was pretty broken up... I sliced into the former on both sides and the bottom to insert some 1/16 ply splicing pieces. I should have taken some pictures of this, but I forgot.. Anyway, some 5 minute epoxy on the tail and splices and aligned it the best I could. I did not come out too bad, but it's not perfectly straight. I also added another piece of 1/16 ply to cover the complete bottom because that area was so damaged.

The wing was going to be more of an issue. About 1/4 of the wing was gone and the plans only show the wing from the top. What do the ribs and spars really look like? Then, an AhhHaa moment. The instructions are available on the Mountain Models web site and they include pictures of the cut wood. The plans show the part names... Sweet. Then one more thought. I have the PDF-X-Change viewer program which allows you to resize and tile pdf files for printing. I figured out that enlarging the pictures of the balsa parts in the instructions by 425% gave me almost exactly the correct size. So now I had the templates for my missing 1/4 wing and the aileron! See the first 4 pictures!

I used thin C/A for building up the new wing and used Titebond for gluing to the existing wing. I also used splicing pieces on each side of the main spar and leading edge. The training edge used 3. Using Titebond allowed me time to keep checking the alignment. Again, it's close but not perfect.

I had just enough Orange covering left over from the initial build to cover the repairs. I have not tried to balance it yet. Hopefully I'm not too tail heavy now. I can't wait to try it, but the 8 inches of snow on the ground needs to melt first. I really missed flying this plane at the end of last year. I'm glad I fixed it!

Steve

[soarrich]

Great thread, I learned a lot. Very nice rebuild too.