I have just popped in to the office for a while so I thought I would do the last post before the DG500 is off to the slope for its maiden flights. During the last couple of days , the weather has been hot so epoxy tends to cure rapidly so progress has been speedy, and I am multi-tasking to finnish this glider.
In the last post I was busy bagging wings, these came out ok but a tad on the heavy side, but hugely strong with all the carbon( the pair weigh about 7500grams).
The wing joiner and wings all fit together nicely and now I am busy setting up controls and servo's .
The rudder is operated by a closed loop system and as an avid deepsea fisherman I found some stranded trace wire with a plastic sleeve in my tackle box which at 90lbs breaking strain was ideal. This was cut to size and crimped together(no solder here), two springs attach the cables to a bellcrank made of dural which in turn is driven by a servo/ linkage.
The nose weight was moulded in a foil disposable pie dish (thickish aluminium)which was fashioned into a shape that would fit the gliders nose(about 2.5kg needed to balance at this point).
The nose weight is held in place by two steel bolts which have been epoxied into place with large washers and then glassed over with carbon cloth to spread the loads. I cant have this weight move about . I have also made a set of smaller weights for trimming.
The all up weight has now been revised to 15kg which feels dam heavy to me, but gives a wing loading of 69gr/per dmsq, I saw a video on the internet of a 7mtr Nimbus being launched and flying gracefully at a wing loading of 100gr /dmsq so maybe its not to heavy.
If it should ever land out it would require a team to fetch it, I get tired just moving it around.
Very rigid wings these with hardly any flex, in this photo it is fully weighted.
Cheers for now,
Hope it flies,
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