My New Stik . . .

I purchased the cheap new 60 sized Stik that I read about in an RC forum.  It was cheap.  Not only in price but everything else.  I had to make a lot of modifications to suit my taste but it is there and I have flown in four times.  I have a Magnum .90 four stroke engine on it.

But I had fuel tank problems.  At first I thought it was the clunk getting trapped in the front of the fuel tank.  That happens when you have an abrupt stop while landing.  And I had one.  The landing gear had come loose and of course there was no roll out.  That was easily fixed, I installed new screws on the landing gear and this time used Lock-Tite on the mounting screws and they are not vibrating out anymore.

But the flights were limited, short duration which usually means a problem in the fuel tank.  The usual fix is to very violently shake of the aircraft with an aft motion with a quick stop.  The inertia usually makes the clunk come loose and all is well.  That did not work.

So I took fuel tank out.  In this airplane that is easy to do, it is held in place by some old Styrofoam blocks.  So I just had to remove the blocks for access to the tank.  Got it out and took the bung off.  The bung has two holes in it with metal tubes, one tube is the fuel feed line and the other is the pressure line that comes off the muffler.  Well when I got the bung out, I found the feed line loose in the tank, it had come off the metal through tube.  I fished it out and threw it away.  I got some new fuel line and a heavier clunk and mounted it all up again.  Then I replace the tank and the Styrofoam blocks.  All done now.

I also had a trim problem with the wings, so I brought the wind inside to see what the problem was.  I have these neat servo checkers and little battery pack to power the checker and the servo.  And I found the left servo kind of skipping.  So I opened up the servo box and preceded to check things out.  I found the servo arm to loose.  I tightened up and noticed it was dragging on the exit slot a bit.  so I have trimmed some material off the slot and now the arm moves unimpeded.  Since I had messed with the control rods I had to reset them up again.  Easy to do, just takes a bit of patience to do it.  All is okay now with the wings.

So with a nice slow charge I will go fly again to check things out.  The Stik looks good but has its problems.  I do not think it will last very long and the covering is exceptionally poor.  It is not MonoKote, it really looks like cheap shelf paper that shrinks.  So I know there is no replacement of the covering if the bird gets damaged.  I have saved scraps here and there but those are small, good enough to take care of hangar rash but not much else.

The bird flies good enough.  We will see how long it lasts.  I am sure something will cause it to go down.  Time will tell.