...2. The leadouts need to go farther forward and this seems to be a big problem on wings with an extreme taper as this one has. The lead outs need to come out the LE, not the forward part of the tip. Mine had enough yaw to make several of the over head maneuvers really suck. So it no longer exists...

Ty-

This may be one of those points where the "steenking math" comes in handy - maybe not?

Anyway, I bought a copy of George Aldrich's original (6/60) "Magnum" plans at VSC's Aldrich auction. The "Magnum" has a highly swept leading edge and quite a bit of taper. He was not happy with the plane's performance, although later builders found theirs to fly well. Over a year later (8/61), George had penciled in leadouts going through the leading edge, a 1" shorter nose, and an inch longer tail. I think he must just have placed the original c.g. according to the root chord length and position, rather than referencing the MAC, thus getting it far ahead of where it should have been, because on this plane, the MAC is further aft relative to the root chord. He probably never computed it. By shortening the nose and lengthening the tail, he would essentially just have moved the wing forward in an effort to chase the c.g., when the c.g. should have been placed relative to the lifting surface MAC in the first place. The wing move would have moved the c.g. a bit further forward anyway. A think later builders probably placed their c.g.'s better.

So, did you check the c.g. position? I think most straight and squarely built models should fly well with proper c.g. and control ratios.

Just a thought.

SK

A lot of the older magazine plans(pre '70 or so) show what happens when you design to a formula without understanding why the formula works.  It took a looong time after Wild Bill and Pete Soule and friends figured out the engineering of our little toys and what the critical parameters were.  Now you can design a new plane from the C.G. up and be sure that it will fly pretty much the way you want with no major surgery required.

The only times I've gotten is trouble is when I skipped steps, like not calculating the pushrod loads or something like that.

Another reason for disappointment is that many of the magazine plans, especially earlier ones, were modified by the draftsman when he didn't understand the modelers working drawings.  For some examples, look at the classic plane published in Flying Models in the 1990's.  Many(some) of them were redrawn to correct changes made in the original article.