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| Vulcan from
JetSmart by Gary Knight |
Not many of you
will have heard of Jetsmart Models. They have been in
existence for approximately 12 months selling their 400 sized
Vampire kit, which was very well received.
Their new model for 2002 is the Avro Vulcan, which I will be
reviewing in this article. The kits retail at £60 and
contain a set of veneered foam wings, over a dozen plastic
mouldings plus various balsa and lite-ply parts needed to
complete the model. You will need 2 400 sized electric
motors, a speed controller, R/C gear and a sub/c 7 or 8 cell
nicad to complete the kit.
Assembly began
with the wings. Following the instructions, cut-outs were
made in the wing root of each wing panel for the battery box
and receiver. The leading and trailing edges were attached
followed by the balsa fillets for the engine intake fairing.
The wing panels were then joined and the centre section
bandaged.
The trailing edge is made up of two sections with the wiring
for the servos and motors routed through channels cut into
the balsa. All pretty conventional so far, no problems were
experienced with the wing construction until now. I decided
to cut out the servo wells and found that the drinking straw
built into the wing for routing the aerial out to the wing
tip ran straight through the middle of the servo bay!
(JetSmart are addressing this problem in future kits). I
added the lower engine nacelles at this point.
With most of the wing assembly finished, it
was time to begin construction of the fuselage.
The battery box is constructed first and then a round former
is glued to the front of the box and a horizontal former is
attached to the front of that to support the abs fuselage
halves at the joining seam.
Once constructed, the nose section was epoxied to the wing
and the rest of the lower fuselage mouldings added
I had decided not to fit a rudder so the fin
was glued together, strengthening fillets added to the base
of the fin to increase the glueing area and the fin was
epoxied into place.
The tail moulding was trimmed and fitted along with the
battery hatch.
The motors were soldered to the power leads
and epoxied into place in the engine nacelles, you will need
to cut away a portion of the trailing edge to fit the motors
into place.
The ailerons were assembled and sanded to shape and hinged
with the supplied mylar. A ply plate was glued into each
servo bay and the servos mounted with servo tape. The
pushrods were bent to shape and fitted.
There are servo covers supplied to protect the servo arms
during landings which were cut to size and secured with
electrical tape (see picture 7).
The front engine ducts were assembled from the 4 mouldings
supplied and glued into place on the wing leading edge. The
balsa fillets added previously was sanded until flush with
the duct assemblies. The upper engine nacelles were added to
complete the construction.
With the model
built, it was time to think about covering and painting. I
covered the wings with film and used Prymol to remove the
gloss finish of the film and enable the paint to stick.
I wanted to make the model look fairly scale so I drew in the
panel lines at this point before spraying the whole model
with matt white paint. Roundels were painted on and the
cockpit windows picked out in black. Time to fly it!!
As luck would
have it, we had a nice cold spell of weather with little or
no wind and clear skies so I had no excuses for putting off
the moment. Andy Mackay volunteered to launch the model so I
could concentrate on the model for those vital first few
seconds of every maiden flight. A hefty throw and it was
away.
I needed to feed in a fair bit of down trim before the launch
speed bled off and that was it really, the model tracked away
very straight with no further trimming required. Speed built
up fairly quickly and the Vulcan felt just like my Multiplex
Twinjet. I gained plenty of height and tried out the stall
characteristics, it was a non-event, the model just mushed
along very slowly showing no tendency to drop a wing. Power
back on and some mild aerobatics were tried. The Vulcan loops
and rolls very well and some very unscale-like manoeuvres can
be achieved. The landing was very easy with the model just
mushed in to land with the nose held up. If you look at the
flying shots, you can see the angle of attack you can
maintain on a low pass without the model falling out of the
sky.
The Vulcan
builds into an excellent stand-off scale model.
It would make an ideal successor to all those bent Twinjets
you've had fun with last summer and what's more, it actually
looks like a 'proper' aeroplane.
BUY ONE ~ NOW!
The reason for
me needing lots of down trim on the maiden flight was that
when I'd epoxied the engines into place, I'd inadvertently
built in some up-thrust due to inadequate spreading of the
epoxy. This has since been rectified.
Article by Gary Knight for Bumpy Green Model Aerodrome
10th January 2002
| Comments left by others... |
Brought this kit back to the States before starting to build. Had trouble interpreting the plans which are not full scale or even true to scale. Primarily could not figure out assembly sequence which is critical. After a few e-mails back and forth and some new parts (sent free I might add) I finished model in the white livery. Used standard cheapy 400's and 8x1700 CP pack. Was tempted to add two brushless ---not neccessary. Flights are very realistic. Easy hand launch but takes a while to get "on step". Very controllable at low speed. Steep climb outs are neat looking and the 1/2 loop with roll off top is a genuine manouevre for this bomber. Very nice, complete, kit but plan details/notes could be improved. Plastic parts are good fit except for exhaust nacelles (inlets were easy and quite a good fit) which required a bit of filling and fairing to match the wing profile --- easily done however. Haven't seen another one yet, over here |
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