Checking wings before final coat of paint

Wishful thinking, the shots are from the workshop of Pitet Air Service in d’Epinal-Dogneville France. We attended the SpinaWatt 2008 event, and were kindly allowed to use the hangar of Pitet Air Service to store all our models overnight.

Always interesting to have a look around in other workshops, and although this is a full size shop, it is interesting to note how many techniques we share. Lite aircraft also use iron on covering, pull pull setup for rudder is done the same way… hey, I could use a workshop like that.

If you want to see more of the Pitts, take a look at this website: http://www.pitetairservice.com/restau_pitts.html

For the retractable landing gear in my DG303 glider, i chose to use a DS20UMD servo for the retract (and all other functions). Using the programming software I was able to program the servo for 170 degree rotation, and as the servo is proportional I am able to finetune the endpoints from my transmitter.

Power is more than adequate for this application, mind you, it is a landing gear for a 24kg glider. Actually the DS20UMD is way stronger than most of the classical retract servos.

Glider landing wheels actually pop in and out quite fast, so i haven’t reduced the servo speed in this setup. If it was for a warbird, servospeed should be slowed down for realistic looking retract operation.

You might argue that you don’t always have your laptop handy for programming the servos, but no problem, Emeter V2 is capable of programming the servos – in addition to all the other functions it pack.

Actually, what was so good about that?? – most of us like to spend time at the airfield, flying and meeting with fellow club members.
When you put together an ARF model, it is usually done within a week, and the testflight phase is not about ‘will it fly’, but how well does it handle and how does it suit my flying style.

I have a passion for gliders, high performing, sleek wings, minimal fuselages, all molded in carbon, kevlar and lots of other high tech stuff. Recently it has been mostly scale gliders, either for aerotowing or electrified self launching gliders.

Last year i attended several aerotow meetings. Most pilots were flying sleek modern gliders, but there were also a few ‘oldies’ that caught my eye. Beatiful wooden scale gliders, very realistic looking, and surely also very fun to thermal with, slow and low, not high and fast as you tend to fly the high performing gliders.

Not many ARF wooden gliders on the market, and as I like to build (time permitting), I began looking into the ‘almost ready to build’ market. Kits with CNC cut parts is a big timesaver, first you save time needed to source materials, and second you save time by not having to cut all formers, wing ribs etc.

I decided on a Göppingen GÖ4 glider from the late thirties, not exactly sleek and certainly not with a minimal fuselage. It was a trainer glider with the pilots sitting side by side, so the fuselage is quite roomy. In short it is so ugly that you can only love it.

Being scale 1:3.5 it will be a perfect match for most of the tow planes around, and also a size that is reasonable to handle in the hobbyshop and transporting to the airfield.

Building started right after Christmas, and as i make sure to put in a few hours nearly every day, it is progressing well.

Towplane will be a reincarnated Taxi. The first Taxi crashed beyond repair last year, but the setup with Z65 motor, A123 cells and lots of charging capacity had really proven itself at several aerotow meetings, so this will also be the setup this year.