Ted, thanks for all the help. I really do appreciate it.
Line tension appears to be consistent throughout, and I can't see the outboard wheel pant for the inboard one so I figure I'm tracking ok. wings appear to be level, but I haven't had anyone eagle eyed enough to tell me for sure. It's carrying a bit more tip weight that it needs right now, as it tends to hinge a bit. AS for whether it's dragging it's tail, that I can't tell you, I'll have to watch for that.
Steve, you bring up some good points, let me go through them peice by peice.
Firstly, this isn't your average kit chippy. It's carrying more area, and no assymetry (and a foam core wing with a fat LE) tail moment arm has been extended by 3" and the nose moment reduced by 1" the the tail has been built up rather than using the planks of mahogany in the kit, and the cowling is a carbon fibre one weighing less than an ounce. In fact, the only parts of the plane than came out of the box are the wheel pants, engine rails and canopy!
point 1.My recollection is that the plastic Super Chip cowl is about 3 oz. That's pretty heavy IMO! Most either make a balsa cowl or use the kit part to make a plaster mold for a cowl of FG/CF/epoxy...and then pitch out the kit part.
True, that's why I pitched it as soon as I'd taken a carbon copy of it.
point 2.If you'd "overcooked", it would turn tighter outsides than insides, so stop worrying about that!
Cool, I'll breathe a sigh of relief!
point 3. Actually, with soft outsides, you'd want to add down elevator. Also helps the groove, sometimes, but not always. Can make the fuselage not appear to fly level, either upright or inverted.
Yeah, as I was saying I haven't checked it, but I can say that if it was, it wasn't enough to draw my eye to it dragging it's backside around.
point 4. How did you align the engine/wing/stabilizer? Incidence meters or eyeball or something between? Using the kit wing cutout, edge of the fuselage and the notch for the stabilizer for alignment most likely isn't good enough, no matter who makes the kit. I put my comments in Italics and Navy Blue to help pick them out. Also made a few of your statements bold for others to notice and re-read. OBTW, you are following the plane with your arm on outsides, right? Some have trouble learning outsides because they don't, so I thought I'd mention it. I'm still voting to put some downthrust in that puppy for a flight, before messing with the handle. Hoff Steve
Wing and stab decalage is checked using my workbench (a large flat sheet of glass), by measuring from the table top up to the LE & TE. Wing is set at 0° as stated before the stab is running 1/32" positive at the LE. Motor mounts are set at 0°. Wing alignment in relation to the fuse is reasonably easy with a straight TE, and foam shucks, and the stab is set with it's hinge line directly parallel to the wing hinge line, and stab tilt is zero. (I tend to build alignment jigs rather than use my mk1 eyeball).
As for flying, yeah, I follow the plane all the time. I learned that the hard way!
I've still got some more trimming to do, and now that I've sealed the hinge lines, I'll try again, see if that fixes it, then move on to downthrust, then handle spacing.
Thanks guys!