Sport 30% Edge 540 Pete Marshall Plans with Laser Cut Short Kit

[rcpilot82]

I just took out the wood lining inside the cowl. It will work just beautifully with a little extra space on the bottom.

What are the part numbers you ordered?

 

[Bluepilot2003]

I emailed Pilot RC's owner directly for a cowl that was just primed and not painted. The same cowl bought from chief aircraft has a part number of PRC COWLED-30.

 

[Bluepilot2003]

I built the horizontal stabilizer much the same as I built the vertical stabilizer. The elevator halves were a little bit harder to get the tips perfectly lined up. As you can see, I them like dominoes, only backwards. I also built the two halves side by side. As I was doing it, I had a little unwelcome guest into my garage (bad part about a 95 degree garage... have to leave the door open to get some airflow with a fan). For the back of the elevator, I used 2x 1/16” balsa sheeting cut to 10mm wide to get the length needed on the elevator. The elevator tips were sandwiched between the sheeting as I glued them together. For the tubes, I needed to expand the holes in the stabilizer ribs so it would fit.


When I started building the wings, I first checked the fit of the wing tube into all the ribs and plywood doublers. The ribs were an easy fit, but the doublers needed to be dremeled out a bit for a good fit. That is probably a good thing to make sure the tubes are nice and tight in the wing structure. Then I glued the doublers to the associated wing ribs. The W-4 doublers were made oversize since the spacing between the wing tube and the wing spar is so little. I tried to cut the doublers to the right size spacing between the wing tube and spar, but could not make it work. I ended up cutting the doublers in half, sanding the middle part flush where the wing spar would go, and glue them in after I had the wing tube in place.


After I had W-4 in place and glued, I came to the conclusion I wanted a really floaty plane. So I added 1/4” more spacing between the rest of the ribs which gave me 2” more total wingspan on each half. Each rib was glued in while aligned on the plans with a builder's triangle to get them perfectly vertical. Then I epoxied the wing tubes into place. Both wing halves are to this point.

 

[Bluepilot2003]

I wish I had more pics of progress recently, but waking up at 4:30 in the morning for work the past two weeks has drained me of wanting to do anything!!!

I did get the canopy that I ordered and test fit it. The canopy I ordered was the 30% Extra 230 canopy from Fiberglass Specialties... most definitely too small for this bird. That was very sad. So now I think I am going to send the plans to them to see which canopy they make that would fit... should have done that the first time!

 

[rcpilot82]

Just thinking, the PRC cowl was a good fit, maybe the canopy would work? My buddy is building the YAK right now and the PRC cowl fit great and the canopy works good after a little modification.

 

[Bluepilot2003]

I thought about ordering the Pilot cowl as well, but he was asking like $100 bucks for it. I emailed Fiberglass Specialties about it and gave them the dimensions necessary. They called me and discussed the situation. He was a very nice gentleman that said "just making a canopy work" isn't as easy as it sounds. The closest canopy they have to make it work is a 1/3 scale Extra 300. The next two months will be busy again for me, so I probably won't order this until Christmas now... sadly. I've done a little more work on the plane, I just haven't taken the time to get them up here yet.

 

[Bluepilot2003]

The 1/3 scale canopy should work. The part number from fiberglass specialties is LRC-8-C.

The first couple pictures are of putting the spars and webbing into the wings. Both wings are complete with that. Then I sheeted the top halves of the horizontal stabilizers. After that was complete, I ran into a question... where/how am I going to put the elevator servos?!?!?!?!? The plans show the servos in the stabilizer halves, but you can see the servo bodies are much larger than the thickness of the elevator halves. What are any of your guys' thoughts on how to do it properly? I have a picture of where it could possibly go into the fuselage.

Next step for me was to cut the aluminum rod for the horizontal stabilizers to the correct size. The way I did that was to screw the halves onto the fuselage without the rod installed at all. Then I placed the rod as in the picture and measured to the correct length. I cut it with a hack saw. I sanded the end down a bit for a perfect fit. Very sturdy and tight!

The last picture is of the fuselage parts all put together. I couldn't resist! Motivation to keep this project moving for me. Hopefully way more to come in the near future

 

[pawnshopmike]

Looking good!

 

[mikeh]

Looking good! About your elevator servo , do you have enough room to lay it flat in the stab? If not you could put it in the fuse. But if you have to remove the stab for transportation you will have to disconnect your elevator linkage.

 

[BalsaDust]

On my cap I built of Petes design I turned the servo 90 degrees of the way they normally are