From sketch to Flight test in 6 hours....

Yesterday afternoon, i found I had two spare servos, some extensions and a receiver laying around without a home, I also had two 2" estes white tubes and a coupler. I borrowed an interceptor cone from one of my other models and got to doodling. I basically grabbed an F-4 phantom wing, with some side plates to mimick engine intakes, took the tail from my Arc-light, used my template for the SST to trim the rear at an angle. Drew it up and did some initial CG calculations, moved the wing foward till the CG was right at the coupler joint since I knew my component/cone/motor weight usually averaged out at that point in the model. Drew it up on a napkin at 3:00. Got home at 5 and started cutting using some of the curved foam sheets I have sitting around, put some carbon in spots to help straighten/stiffen it.

For the wingtips I just cut a V groove and pulled them up and glued them in place after sanding the edges round.

Mounted the wing on the bottom of the tube, installed the tail and motor mount and did some indoor confirmation of the CG location. Installed electronics and had it ready to go by 9pm. Turned out I needed 1/4 ounce of tail weight, so I could have pushed the wing forward just a tad but it's pretty darn close to perfect.

Flew it this morning and it was great. Wing loading is similar to my deltas, boost needed just a hair of down trim, glide was spot on about 1/4" up trim. Really beautiful, nice thick smoke trail this morning with pure blue sky, glide took very little control input for turns, I came on approach at around 100 feet at the end of the runway and it just settled hands off till just before flare. Really nice. I was easily getting over 1 minute glide time in dead air.

I'm calling it IronHand. Still need to do panel lines and some other little details.

38" long, 26" wingspan, 11.5 ounces ready to fly. 5.3 ounce/sq foot wing loading.

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