Posted by Tyler Madison | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on 08-04-2010
I got the Weasel yesterday delivered to my front door in a pretty small box. I was plesently surprised to find that the fuselage and the wings go together very easily; all they need is a little tape down the seams and some masking tape to hold them together, no 3M 77 spray on this baby!
I decided to make mine a one piece (wing, body and tail all taped together) so it was quite easy to skip onto covering. Here’s where it got a little time consuming…I had previously built a Combat Wing 48″ XR and it was pretty easy to just cover with color tape, however I found that it was quite messy and the finish wasn’t top notch. So I decided to use UltraKote to do the job. I think this is where 3-4 hours came in to play where i painstakingly tried to be careful with the foam and heat temperature to make it stick and shrink enough, but not to melt or warp the foam. My only experience with iron on covering was building balsa wood gliders back in the day, so I was pretty cautious, which ended up paying off because I got some pretty nice looking results that really standout while on the ground and in the air.
All in all it was a very simple build. Servos just pushing into place, battery fit perfect, control horns and clevises hooked up nicely. The one thing that I was undecided about was that there was very little to no room for error when placing the elevon control horns because the pushrods are already pre-cut and cannot really be adjusted more than a 1/8 of an inch or so.
Onto flying, so after my successful one late evening build with some nice coloring and decent covering job I was ready to fly the next morning. The winds were 12-17mph North West at Mussel Rock. Wasn’t sure if this was exactly ideal for my first flight but what the heck, no guts no glory! So I let her rip. First thing I noticed right away is that it took off like a bat out of hell straight up into the wind. Fearing a stall I nosed her down till she steadily was on the rise and continued to get altitude, enough where I felt comfortable enough to test out the turning radius etc. To caveat all this I went ahead and set the throws to the Expert pilot recommendations which is about 5/16 inch of throw up and down. This may have had something to do with my surprise at how quick and nimble this little guy was.
From there on after trimming it a little and adding some expo to my elevator flying was quite fun, just keep in mind that this thing has some serious speed and likes to be constantly moving. If you’re a beginner which I pretty much consider myself in the slope soaring arena, you might want to make sure that you have your throws taken back a little maybe to 1/8 or something like that, or turn down the percentages on your transmitter. All in all it was quite fun, no crashes or anything , my hands actually got too cold is the reason I finally brought it back in, which I hand caught by the way, lifted the hatch cover up, flipped the switch, and threw it back in my trunk for next time.
I will say that I will be making some small tweaks to compensate for not EXACTLY EXACTLY following the elevon template as I mentioned earlier there is very little room for error if none at all due to the push rods being precut to the exact size based on the plans. Obviously if I could redo that section or order new ones I would have triple checked the distances and come up with a better plan for drilling the holes and placing the control horns. Great plane, fun, fast, and is always moving.
Tyler -Pacifica Ca.




