The rudder and elevator servos and pushrods (above left) are already installed. It’s a simple matter to hook the pre-bent pushrods to the control horns on the flying surfaces. Adjustments on the tail surfaces are done at the servo arms with the screw-lock connectors. The single bolt on the bottom of the fuselage holds the wing and fuselage together, along with the two front pegs mentioned in the text. The SuperTigre 30A ESC (above center) is held to the
Since the plane comes receiver-ready, there’s really very little to do to make it flight-ready. The two micro servos for the rudder and elevator are mounted in pockets in the fuselage with the pushrods in place, and the two micro servos for the ailerons are recess-mounted in the bottom of the wing and already connected to the aileron control horns. The SuperTigre 30-amp ESC is hook- and-loop mounted to the inside of the fuse-
lage, and in turn connected to the 1000 Kv brushless outrunner motor with 3.5 mm bul- let connectors.
Assembling the Hellcat
Clear guidance through the brief assembly process is provided by a nicely illustrated eight-page instruction manual that leaves little question as to how things should go to- gether. The rudder and stabilizer interlock with each other and then are fitted to the fuselage, while at the same time the tail wheel steering arm is inserted into a plastic tube in the base of the rudder. Once those op- erations are done simultaneously, a long bolt fastens that assembly to the fuselage by go-
fuselage side with “hook and loop” fasteners. Note that the end of the battery is just showing from its mounting area as far forward as possible. See the text for options in connecting the ESC to the battery. The three-bladed prop (above right), scale aluminum spinner, and dummy engine cylinders do a great deal to dress up the front of the plane and add to its scale looks. A dummy Pratt and Whitney engine is also included within the cowl.
ing up through the stabilizer into a hard plastic fitting embedded in the rudder. I did have a bit of difficulty in getting the bolt to fully tighten and applied more mus- cle than I was comfortable applying before it seated itself securely and locked everything in place. My surmise is that there may have been a bit of glue or something blocking the threads at the aft end of the plastic fitting which finally gave in to what I ordinarily would consider excessive force.
Since tightening the screw is essentially a blind operation with the screw hidden in a recessed hole deep in the fuselage, I had vi- sions of either stripping out the plastic hous- ing, or seeing the whole assembly pop out the side of the rudder! Fortunately, neither of those things happened, and the tail as- sembly snugged up nicely with the fuselage once the screw broke through whatever was impeding it.
Mentioning the tail wheel steering arm points up the fact that the Hellcat does have a steerable tail wheel, a nice feature lacking in its sibling, the Corsair. My club mate, Mike Light, did fashion a clever internal tail
wheel steering arrangement on his Corsair, which helped its ground handling immense- ly. However, that feature is thankfully pres- ent on the Hellcat and makes taxiing out and back before and after a flight an exten- sion of the plane’s realism. The Hellcat offers the option of either hand launching with the landing gear omit- ted, or plugging in the landing gear for take- off and landing. I opted to use the gear, so it was a simple matter to insert the sturdy wires into hard plastic housings securely in- set into the bottom of the wing. The gear wires have a U-shaped bend at the insertion end which provides a secure fit, but can be removed at any time for hand launching and belly landings by simply pulling them out of their elongated sockets.
Installing the wing requires nothing more than fitting the two molded pegs at the lead- ing edge into hardened indentations in the fuselage, pushing the provided aileron Y- harness wire up through a hole in the fuse- lage, and tightening a plastic bolt from the inside of the fuselage to snug up the wing/fuselage joint. There are no bolts visi-
The main gear legs simply plug into a hardened plastic housing (above left) embedded in the foam wing. The U-shaped end of the gear wire provides the appropriate amount of tension to hold the sturdy assembly in place. The landing gear can also be removed for hand launching by simply pulling the gear wires out of their sockets, and then re-inserted for standard takeoffs and landings. A standard 9-gram servo (above center) powers each aileron with functions being
FLYING MODELS
coordinated using a provided Y-harness. The servos are flush mounted in pockets and glued in place. The pushrod and screw-lock connector are already installed by the manufacturer. A nice feature not always found on smaller models is the steerable tail wheel (above right), mounted in the bottom of the fuselage with a steering arm inserted into a plastic housing in the rudder. Ground handling is vastly improved with this feature.
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