Gotta New Plane . . .

Well the plane is new to me, it is used.  It was gathering dust of which I had to clean off.  It is a Stik model designed for a .60 cubic inch two cycle alcohol engine.  I happen to use a .91 cubic inch four cycle engine, roughly the same amount of power, maybe a little more.

The person that had the plane had a .91 Magnum four cycle engine on it, so it was sort of setup for my engine.  I had to mount the engine on the engine mount rails but since they were already drilled and properly spaced it was a no brainer.  I did have to reverse the carburetor and that was a matter of removing two screws, turning the carburetor 180 degrees and reinstalling the screws.  So the engine is  done and hooked up to the throttle servo which was already installed in the fuselage.

Next I had to install a main landing gear with tires.  The owner had cannibalized the main landing gear for another model.  Fortunately, I had exactly the same landing gear in my spare parts box.  I keep all the landing gears from airplanes past and there it was all read to install.  I had to poke around for a hour in my hard sources to get four screws to mount it with.  Finally found four that will do the job and the landing gear is installed.

Next it had some checkerboard markings on the sides and top of the fuselage.  They were ugly in my estimation.  I used the heating iron to soften the stickum that holds the decals in place and peal them off.  Not to hard to do.  So that is removed and it looks more realistic now.

It had a small tear in the wing and I had to patch that up.  There is another patch that does not match on one of the Maltese Crosses on the wing.  I will have to heat that up and remove the old dark blue patch and install a black patch that will match the Maltese Cross material.  I have plenty of MonoKote to do the repairs. 

MonoKote is a plastic covering that has stikum on one side to adhere to the airplane surface.  The outside is the finish.    It takes a small sealing iron to make it stick to the balsa surfaces.  Then one uses a heat gun to stretch it.  So it is heat sensitive.  Wrinkles can be removed with the heat gun.

The control surfaces had a lot of wrinkles.  Nothing impacting performance but not good looking.  I removed some of the wrinkles and will work on the rest of them. 

Any way a couple of hours work and she is ready to go.  I had to replace a fuel line too.  It is all done now.

Next is to tune up the receiver and set up the controls.  That is an easy task.