bly and then double check that no joints have been missed.
Another picture shows the wheel well lin- er installed into the wing opening and glued in place. Lead shot bags are used to hold all parts in place as the glue dries. Later on you will add a 1⁄64 plywood doubler to the inside of the gear bay and glue the whole assembly to the upper wing skin.
Since I fly off a grass field I have found that sealing any gap between the wing and wheel well makes cleaning a lot easier later on. I seal the joint between the well and the upper wing skin with silicone caulking which is light and easy to apply. One way of making sure the wing mount- ing holes and the wing hold down screws align is to insert two sharpened screws from the bottom of the hold down brace. Position the wing in place and push down until you have a firm indentation. Double check the wing for alignment and then drill the mat- ing holes.
Before gluing the stabilizer in place, check and recheck and then recheck again that the stabilizer is both square to the fuselage and parallel to the wing saddle. Since the wing saddle is on the bottom of the fuselage and the stabilizer saddle is on the top, make sure they are both level and square. Do not rush this step. Check and recheck the alignment.
One picture shows the start of the fuse- lage subassembly. The 1⁄64-inch doubler side pieces were glued in place earlier us- ing the Top Notch Products pin registry
method. The pin registry method insures that the doubler side pieces are properly positioned. Before gluing the doubler pieces to the sides, check that you are building both a left and right side and you have a doubler sheet on the correct side. Now, you can glue all the pieces together. The Mooney Mite is a big model with plenty of room to install all the required innards. Right? Wrong. It seems my big fat fingers al- ways get in the way. But in the end it all works. Remember to always be conscious of the c.g. location. In the case of the Mooney Mite it is a short coupled plane. That means you have a short nose and a long tail. So any weight in the tail can make a great difference in balance. To aid in getting more weight for- ward I used two standard Hitec servos—one for the engine control, and another to operate the landing gear servo valve.
Mooney M-18 Servo Chart Usage
Rudder
Landing gear HS-425 BB one Elevator Aileron Flaps
Engine
HS-85 BB two HS-225 BB two HS-225 BB two HS-425 BB one
Nose steering HS-85 BB one
In order to balance the Mooney the bat- tery and some servos are mounted on the underside of a homemade component tray. The receiver and wiring has been tem- porarily positioned and held in place by hook and loop tape. Once the final c.g. is lo- cated, component positions will be marked and the items fastened in place. I’ve includ- ed a list of all the Hitec servos used in the model, where used, part number and num- ber required. The Mooney has been designed for electric power and there is no doubt that it makes for a cleaner looking plane. However, a nice glow engine will also fit but it will take some doing to get the c.g. correct.
Stock # Required HS-85 MG one
Finding the c.g. is not that bad; it is not that good either. I removed the cockpit cov- er and put two screws into blocks and glued them at the balance point shown on the plans. Then the fun began as I now had to pick which component to move. In my case I moved several components to the un- derside of the receiver board. It now works. There is nothing so sweet or anxious as
that first flight. I may even stop shaking any time soon. The takeoff roll was uneventful. As the plane gained speed it started to want to veer left so a little right rudder was added and before I knew it I had a beautiful flying plane. No trimming was required as that will wait for the second flight. What still awaits is a test of flap and exercising the landing gear. The Mooney Mite is a fast flying plane and to date it has no bad habits.
Gear down just before touch down on Joe’s second flight. Joe found the Mooney to be a smooth, stable model with no bad habits and an absolute joy to fly. FLYING MODELS 51
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