This trick was shown to me by Colton Clark and it's a foolproof method to secure your Tygon tubing to your fuel fittings. Real simple, all you do is slice a ~1/8" section of the same Tygon tubing, place the small slice into the end of a pair of needle nose pliers, spread the pliers open, then slip your fuel line into the small slice of tubing. Remove the pliers and you now have a secure way to clamp the tubing onto all of your fuel fittings.

Zip ties leave open room for air to leak in where the tie leg meets the head, and the small spring clips are annoying to deal with and could potentially chafe through the tubing. I've never had a fitting come loose and neither has anybody I've talked to that uses this method. It compresses the tubing evenly all round and without any sharp points of contact.

I've had this airplane for about 2 years now and have grown very fond of it. I've made probably a dozen different changes to its internals to better its performance or improve upon other areas that were not assembled correctly. It has taught me how to really fly 3D with larger airplanes and as such, I refuse to let it die.

I've also managed to crash it probably half a dozen times

I've been fortunate enough to have crashed it in manners where it is rebuildable. This time, I had what I am certain is the engine overheating on me right at the worst possible moment- at the bottom of a waterfall. As I punched full throttle to climb back out the engine decided it had enough and dropped back on me. Truth be told I probably should not have been flying in 95F heat with 95% humidity, everybody was having power loss issues. If you're gonna play with fire you're bound to get burnt at some point.

This blog will document the repairs and changes I make to the airplane from this particular incident. This is what the airplane looked like the day I brought it home. It had roughly 15 flights on it so it was fairly new.



A club member happened to be filming the flight:

Remote control Airplane 107" Stunt Flying and Fail 7-8-2017 (4 min 21 sec)

I know the engine sounds a bit unhealthy but it has ran like this as long as I've owned it. It's really worn out compared to my new DA120.

I have been asked a few times lately about the proper way to install a servo into your aircraft utilizing the grommets and brass eyelets. A lot of people don't actually know and there isn't much documentation on the proper installation procedure so I am going to detail it here.

It's actually very simple, the grommets only install one way into the servo, it's the brass eyelet that you need to be concerned with. For most standard installations, the servo mounting rails will be installed above the mounting surface. The brass eyelets have a small flange on them, this flange is what needs to face into the mounting surface.

The reason you want the flange in the eyelet to face the mounting surface is so that it does not crush the mounting surface when you tighten the screw down. The wide flange spreads the load out, you always want the flange to face the mounting surface.

When you tighten the screw down, you don't want to crank the screw down. There is 2 reasons for this:

1. You don't want to crush the surface the brass eyelet presses into and possibly compromise the mounting surface.

2. You don't want to strip out the hole the screw threads into.

All you need is for the screw to pinch down on the rubber grommet, this will compress the grommet slightly and force it to squeeze both down onto the brass eyelet and squeeze out onto the servo mounting rails. This is plenty sufficient for both small aircraft all the way up to giant scale airplanes

Out of all of the airplanes out there, 2 stand out as being my favorite. The first of which is the Slick, I have 3 of them in my hangar, all Aerobeez- a 48", a 70", and a 91" 70CC. The second of which, and certainly not any lesser, is the Edge 540. I've had a couple of Edge foamies through the years but never anything built up, let alone gas.

So here goes. Nothing over the top fancy, but it's not going to be an entirely stock build either. This is the particular scheme I have.



Now I've actually had this airplane since mid 2015 and decided I no longer want to wait to put it together, out came the credit card!!!

Last night I started with dripping some thin CA onto the outside of the phenolic tubes in both the wings and the elevators to make sure they are locked in place. I also dripped thin CA around the anti-rotation pins and servo pockets. Hitec HSB-9380TH servos were the servo of choice for this airplane for me so I dropped 2 into the left wing panel.

Of course it never dawned on me that I didn't have harnesses or aluminum horns for the servos until after I mounted the servos in place so that is where I stopped for the night.

Well we are down to the last couple of weeks for 2016 and let me say, it's been one hell of a roller coaster (at least for me anyways). My time with Hitec has graced me with so many opportunities this year in the hobby and has taken me places I have only dreamed of going to. I've made lots of new friends, grown closer to the ones I've had, and overall had copious amounts of fun along the way.

It kicked off with a bang, AMA Expo 2017. I had one week to prep a number of airplanes for display at the show both at work and in my own time off, including assembling 2 brand new airplanes for demo inside of the flight demonstration area.



It would be the first time I've ever had to work a show and was going to be there Wednesday through Sunday. Most of my time was spent talking with people- from vendors, to customers, to old friends and new, the whole event felt like it whizzed on by in a blur. I did fly a couple of demo flights with the ParkMaster Pro I had built the week prior with the maiden happening indoors. Didn't really have time to set the airplane up properly before the event so it flew a little odd, but we still had fun with it.



Even though Sunday came quickly, it couldn't come quick enough as I just wanted to get home and get away from everything for a bit. Back to work on Monday

As January came to a close, the first giant scale event of the year took place and me and my flying buddies were all back at it with instigating on the deck shenanigans. Joe Hunt was nice enough to put the event together and I found myself and my girlfriend staying up there Friday and Saturday night and heading home Sunday- originally our plan was to head up Friday night and head home Saturday night but we had so much fun Saturday that we decided to stay a little longer





About as low as you can go before your airplane gets lighter!!!!