Ventus no4 ZS-SWT

So much for recycling..... Ventus no 4 contains the following recycled parts, from no 3

Carbon fibre canopy

Carbon fibre wing joiner (survived a full tilt impact )

Rudder

Servos/linkages

And no small amount of knowledge other than that, this is a totally new aircraft, the recycled parts are probably 3 days worth of work to build.

Because this was a quick build project I needed to try new ideas , one shown above was the wing wiring. Because the HQ/3/12 is fairly thick I decided to wire the wing servos as follows, I cut out the flap and the aileron , then routed a grove into the foam with my Dremel tool , the servo wire was fitted into this slot and then a piece of balsa strip pushed into place to cover it, finally a mix of resin/flox and micro/balloons sealed everything into place it worked well.

While the wing was completed with its wiring , I next routed out a hollow where the control horns attach and made up a plywood tongue, this was bonded in with the same mix and provides a strong point to bolt onto, you can see I have sanded this back down to shape. Note also the ply blocks for the servo in the servo bay epoxied to the top and bottom carbon spar and skins.

Having learnt a valuable lesson with tailplane/elevator linkages, this time I am going for direct drive from a servo mounted in the fin, nothing to bind or snag and easy to adjust.

Attention to detail is important because this fuselage has carbon tows, the arial for the receiver is routed in a plastic tube down the fuselage away fron the tows, visible behind the rudder servo which is now pull/pull with steel cable no more pushrods. A thick wooden dowel forms a compresion strut between the wing leading edges and it is this that probably saved the wing joiner last time.

There she is.. I managed to save about 1.2kg on the last one and with a thicker wing she should fly at a lower speed which should make launches a little easier.
This glider was build in under 2 weeks and is the best one yet in terms of finish, good planning and project management aid in getting such results.

So for those slow coaches out there you have more than enough time to prepare for next years Sungazer.

Cheers for Now

Mike