Maxi Swift underway...

[Keith]

...And so begins my venture into wings... Blame Sentry! He kept pushing me towards a wing and finally convinced me to build one... lol So, here goes!

• 55" MS Composit Maxi Swift
• Suppo 2814-06 motor from Grayson Hobby
• 60 Amp Proton ESC (room to grow!)
• Turnigy 5A UBEC
• Hitec HS-82mg servos
• 5000mAh 3-cell LiPo
• Dragon Link for R/C control
• 2.4GHz 500mW video, either Lawmate or Immersion, I'm leaning towards the latter
• SC2000 PZ0420 600TVL Sony camera (love that thing!)
• Skylark OSD (Thanks Sentry!) Edit - Dragon OSD+ V2

As of right now, I've got the wing, motor, and ESC. The rest of the stuff is still in the mail, should be here soon! I'll update this thread once I have more parts and get more done! For now, here's a picture of the wing, I've simply joined the halves and glued on the winglets (which may get replaced eventually, they seems a bit flimsy to be honest).

[SENTRY]

Horrible decisions. Send me all of these products so I can dispose of them.

[Keith]

LOL I see what you did there...

Working on it now, got a small section of laminate left and that's done...

[rcmike]

You might need bigger servos. I tried some HS81s and with those big elevons they would stall at higher speeds.

[SENTRY]

What speeds? I've had my wing to 80+ and the HS82s work great.

[rcmike]

Actually I forgot, that was before I made the control horns longer. I moved the servos to the top of the wing and the control horns were too short. The 4" wide elevons don't help things.

[SENTRY]

I think the better motor in the 82s and the MG vs plastic (or MG 81s) will be much better. I wouldn't worry about it for now. 82s are heavier, stronger - but a little slower.

[Keith]

I plan on mounting the servos on top of the wing too, don't like the idea of the arms and horns hanging down on the belly lander... I'll probably cut some horns out of 1/8" ply and use that, or maybe dig in my parts boxes and see if I can find some long plastic horns and bolt them through.

Here's some more picture, laminating is all done! Didn't go too crazy with colors, just simple white with an orange leading edge. I had orange tape so I use that under the laminate. I also mounted the motor using the stock plastic mount. I didn't like trusting glue to hold it on though, so I bolted it instead. I used some long M3 screws with threaded inserts from the bottom. The laminate is actually 3 layers there, so it's real tough and seems like there's no way they'll pull through. I put some nylock nust on too just to make sure they don't come loose. There's a layer of 5mil in the center, then two layers of 10mil that overlap there, so in all there's a 25 mil layer of laminate for them to grab on to. It worked out great! Once the servos get here I'll mount those, then wait on the rest of the gear so I can lay it all out and get the CG right before carving bays for it all. Stay tuned!

[SENTRY]

What are you going to do to stiffen the winglets? Did you lam them as well?

[Keith]

At this point I'm not sure... I haven't put any laminate on those, but I will if I fly them. I'll use the thick one. I would really like to replace them with something thinner and more rigid though... I'll probably fly with them first and see, they might be fine!