...the big day! Since the ultimate smash I'd reconstructed the Stinger with a new fuselage and new larger and higher-spec powerpack, all of which I was eager to try out so, with a break in the rather poor run of weather, I headed to the field. As ever, not having flown the Stinger for a while made me nervous. Additionally, I wasn't sure what the effect would be of the substantially-larger 2200 battery compared to the 1800 I'd previously flown with.
Eager to get the Stinger into the air before the sun disappeared behind clouds, I gave it a quick check before getting it ready to launch. Running the motor up for launch, the reaction felt a little odd. Blipping the throttle again revealed the reason - it was blowing air out of the intakes. I'd wired the motor in reverse. Dashing back to the car for my toolkit, quite a way as I was flying in the paddocks, I headed back to the plane to remove wings and swap the plugs. Eventually the Stinger was back together, now developing positive thrust, but the sun had unfortunately taken a break behind a small patch of clouds. Despite the disappointment of losing the beautiful afternoon glow, I hot full throttle and threw the Stinger up. Despite high expectations, this continued the run of miserable launches I've had, the Stinger knife-edging a few metres up. Correcting this and easing off the elevator revealed the next crisis; I hadn't done a good check on the trims and the Stinger was nosediving alarmingly. Bringing it round I heaved on the elevator; going vertically fifty metres up is a nice safe place to make control adjustments. After that things got a lot better; the augmented stripes made visibility so much better I was immediately more confident, and soon I had the Stinger making nicely-controlled low passes at speed, howling past at full throttle...
...hopefully it will be good The Stinger has been reconstructed with its new fuselage and replacement fan unit, fitted with a zen-first R615X receiver and, just yesterday, received its new Nanotech 2200 4S 45-90 power pack. Apart from it looking sharp and new with the replacement fuselage, and interest in how the new DSMX receiver will work, it's the performance impact that the big nanotech will make that I'm most intrigued in. And it is big; in fact it's too wide to fit easily into the fuselage, bulging the foam past the matching form of the canopy. I'm hoping that in due course the foam will compress a little to reduce this distortion but there's no denying that there's a lot of battery there. My experience with 4S nano's on my Rarebear indicate that they offer substantial performance improvements, although I'm not sure whether, in this case, the additional grunt will be offset by the increase in mass over the 1800 40C Zippy I used previously. Anyhow, I'm very interested to try out the reborn Stinger. I had, in fact, been hoping to get it out this afternoon for a test run but the weather wasn't cooperating with overcast and windy weather. Lets hope there's a mild and sunny afternoon in the offing soon...
...hopefully better visibility The biggest issue I have with the Stinger, apart from the super-sensitive aileron setup I had on the first flights, is visibility; the Freewing version has classic sport-jet stripes on the white wing whilst Hobbyking, for their Mk2 version, unfortunately decided on a bespoke black-and-lumo full-body decal. While including a scorpion graphic was kinda groovy, the overall effect is a 21st century take on camouflage. Unsurprisingly, although you could easily see the Stinger in the air, I've found picking the orientation, particularly wing angle change, to be very difficult. Even the tiny Rarebear is much easier to see. And, given that the Stinger is always a little touchy to fly, in combination with the camo decals, it's virtually heart-stopping.
Consequently I've embarked on a degraphic exercise; first of all I removed the decals off the tail-fin, working on the premise that this is the most visible feature on the Radjet. Unfortunately with the Stinger this was unsuccessful, so I've just finished clearing the second wing, making it look rather naked. While this may not be optimum, I haven't the enthusiasm to stripe it and I'll try it out first to see how it goes; and judging by how easy it is to see change on angle on the Rarebear tiny white wings, I think it will be a big improvement. Then, at some stage in the future, if I come across a suitable set of stripes, I'll pimp up the Stinger so that it looks a little less bland...
