Prestige 2006
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July 2006 and my new Prestige has arrived. I have anticipated the arrival of this model for months now and it's a beauty. The plane comes in 2 base colors and the canopy is blue. I chose White and yellow as my 2 base colors. The fuse is constructed with a very light and thin fibreglass/ balsa sandwich with carbon fibre re-enforcing at critical points all along the fuse. The landing gear is unique, sharp looking and strong. A very simple design allowing for a mere 2 screw assembly.
The time needed to construct the plane is minimal compared with something like the Impact ARF. I would say that it took me half the time in hours to finish the Prestige compared with the Impact. At the end of it all and now in my first flights with the new plane, I'm simply thrilled.
The instruction book that came with the plane is in Polish and has yet to be translated. The accompanying pictures tell a complete story and I simply followed the pictures for the most part to complete the plane. Next time, my building time will be cut in half again.
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The only thing that really confused me was trying to figure out a diagram showing the right and wrong way on how to attach a ball bearing type clevis. Just give the clevis a feel with your fingers and you will figure out which is the "pressed" in end, that is.. if you are using the MK style ball bearing clevises. I love them!
The following info and pictures bellow will show you what I did to construct the plane. Also for those who are looking at an electric setup, I'll show battery tray installation. Cooling is always a work in progress situation. It never hurts to have more cooling; the trick is to have effective cooling opposed to a lot of cooling that doesn't work.
What's nice about having a vinyl-cutting machine (other than making graphics) is the ability to make templates for any air inlets that one needs to cut. It has always been a fear of mine to screw up a nice looking plane with ugly looking air inlets, which is very easy to do. So, I designed my inlets in Corel draw, cut them and applied the graphic on the fuse as a template. You simple peel the template off afterwards and there is no guessing involved.
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After cutting the air-cooling holes in the fuse, I mounted/ installed the gear. At first I was sceptical at the simplicity of the gear design as there is nothing to it. The fuse is actually the main supporting structure which scares me a bit, however there is lots of carbon fibre reinforcement here and the carbon box structure that you glue in makes things very stiff. The gear slides in through 2 pre-cut slots and is secured at opposite ends by a single screw.
Most of the time taken to build this plane is thinking I found and waiting for epoxy to cure.
After the gear, I mounted the motor. I had to custom-make my firewall. For the next plane I have a template. Yippy! The motor bolts on the firewall with 3 3mm screws. As simple as that. I also drilled some holes in the firewall where I hope air will pass through for cooling. I think that there is room for improvement in the size of the holes. I may open them up a bit more in the coming days. The spinner that comes with this kit is carbon fibre and about 1 oz lighter than the Truturn. I went further and drilled holes in the backplate. My reasoning was to use this as air pass-through for the motor, however I have not made holes in the cone yet. "They" say that it doesn't make a difference. Who knows, I might try.
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Next, it was time to install the sleeve for the wing. I was assured that this plane comes lined up. I took this assurance and proceeded. All I had to do is slightly sand the holes through the fuse where the wing tube sleeve would fit through. Basically after a few gentle passes of my Dremmel tool, the sleeve fit right in and the tube fit perfectly in through the sleeve. A little glue to secure the sleeve from the inside and a final trim of access tube and the job was done. Same thing for the tail. No trimming was required for the wings or stab to fit against the body. I found that the tail didn't fit perfectly against the fuse. This could be my error in how I glued in the sleeve. However, after the adjusters were installed and screwed on to the guide pin, the stabs draw in to be a good fit with a little pressure to help.
Tail:
The carbon root rib on the stabs have a pre-formed compartment where the stab adjuster fits into perfectly. It is only a matter of screwing in the adjuster.
Servo installation. I followed the picture representation quite closely and opened a compartment in the root rib where my servo would fit through. I used pins and punctured the surface of the underside of the stab and basically located where I would glue in the servo tray (which comes pre-made) The servo installs sideways in the stab half, the head of the servo closest to the fuse. After you have the tray glued in, you screw in you servo and make an opening large enough for the full throw of the servo.
For Ailerons I cut a hole in the wing to drop in the servos opposed to getting servos to fit inside the wing. The wing comes with the servo tray build into a wing rib. I have the low profile Futaba Digital wing servos that would not fit the hole. As well, if you do the servo in the wing, I think that you need slightly longer servo arms and there was a problem with this as well. The aileron servo hub is special with a different than standard hub.
Be careful to drill in the correct place in the aileron and don't miss the hardwood block designed to take the horn like I did. I just caught the edge silly me.
Lining up the wings and tail.
Here I got a bit of help. In order to determine the center line there is a graphic with a whole bunch of measurements included in the instructions. By putting masking tape on the fuse, which you can later peel off, we transposed a line based on markings found on the fuse to establish the centerline used to line up the wing and tail against. Then it was a matter of installing wing adjusters, lining up the plane on a flat table and centering the wings and stab to that line using adjusters. This took more time than I imagined. Around 4 hours. I think it was the longest process in my build.
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Next was the Rudder servo tray installation. This was really simple. The tray supplied sits at the perfect height, all I had to do was make sure I could get my hand in to get to the servo comfortably and there is where I glued it. Also on that try, are 2 places on each side one is for the receiver, and the other is for the battery. 2 velcro strips secure these quite nicely.
I attached the rudder with Dubro ¼ scale plastic hinges and bought music wire to make a tight fit. This I did to make the rudder removable for shipping reasons.
It was simple enough to find the exit holes for the rudder cables and crimp the cables to size. The hinge slots were all pre-cut. All was needed was glue. The tail wheel needs a small hole to be drilled and then it's just screwed in.
Battery tray and ESC support.
The last step before I put graphics on the plane was to glue in a supplied carbon tray, which fit in perfectly just behind the firewall. This tray served 2 purposes. 1.) A place to velcro my Electronic speed controller. 2.) Also one of the 2 resting places to secure my battery tray. Also, this support made the front end more stiff in the area of the chin cowl.
After that, I created a battery tray with the remaining piece of carbon sheet. I made slots for my Velcro bands and glued spacers ( about 1 inch wide) to keep my batteries apart for cooling. On my tray I secure each battery with one band and then have a larger band tying both together. Seems to work just fine. Also at the end of the tray I glue a small piece of light balsa to prevent battery slippage back. The tray which is glued in to the fuse is at a slight angle (upward) which prevents battery slippage to the front.
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The way I decided to secure the tray in the plane was to build 2 small blocks made of basswood and glue them to the leading edge of the landing gear support box. I built the blocks up flush with the top of the box and put a 440 blind nut in underneath the blocks as well. To the front (and since I could not reach in to screw anything) I decided to make two hardwood wedge shaped pieces which I glued and screwed to the tray that holds my ESC. So, now to install the batteries, I secure the Lipos onto the battery tray, slide the tray into place hooking under the wedges and screw two 440 screws to secure the whole asswmbly. Seems pretty solid to me. I have been flying my Impact for about 2 seasons now with a similar setup and with no problems. In the impact I glued 2 carbon rods spaced precisely the width of my tray to the fuse. The front of the battery tray served as a tongue which passed through the 2 carbon rods to secure the front. The rear of the tray was screwed down in 2 places to avoid lateral shifting. I hope my pictures do a better job in explaining.
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The final step was designing, cutting and applying my graphics package. I used Oracal 651 and 541 2mil vinyl for the job. This added a bit of weight, but then I have lots of weight to play with. Some say that a 10 pound airplane is too light for windy conditions?
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I hope that this short write-up was informative.
