Balancing Airplanes The Easy Way

hi I'm Jerri heiress from model airplane news we're going to talk about balancing your model airplane it happens all the time a guy comes to the field and he sets down this airplane that's just been set up it's ready to go it's out on the runway it zips down the runway it's got plenty of power and it takes off as soon as it breaks ground the wings start to wag back and forth the nose comes up way high and before you know it it rolls over and crashes into the ground what happened the pilot forgot to balance his airplane in placing our balance point in the right position on our airplane is super important the reason being is that that position determines how the airplane is going to respond and preform and many airplanes crash because the pilot was trying to fly it when it was too tail-heavy so an airplane that is too tail-heavy it's going to be hypersensitive to your control inputs and this can lead to over controlling the airplane conversely if your airplane is too nose-heavy it's not going to be responsive enough so with a straight wing airplane like this fun cub finding the balance point usually requires measuring the wing and doing a lot of math to find out where that point is but I have an easier way to do it and it only requires two strips of paper and a marking pen so now what we're doing is we're taking our two sheets of paper we're putting it on top of the wing and you can see I've marked the first one and we're going to do the second one now we take the edge of the sheet and we line it up with the leading edge of the wing and then we come back here and we mark the position of the trailing edge so now this distance gives us the exact width of the so here we have our two sheets of paper we've got our marks that show the width of the wing and so to get our front position for the SafeZone we're going to take this and we're going to fold it in half right there to the mark fold it and then we're going to take it and fold it in half again just like this when we open it up we have four equal links and we'll mark the first one and that's the length for the 25% position for the wing we already did this to the second one here but what we did is we folded it into threes just like we did before and what that does is by marking it here it gives us our 33.3% position for the wing so now we're going to transfer our marks onto the wing we're taking our first piece of paper that has the 25% fold on it right here and we're going to mark that on the wing then we'll take the second piece of paper it was folded into threes line up the front of the leading edge and mark the 33 and 1/3 percent which is the back part of our safe zone where we're going to put our balance point in between so when it actually comes to the balancing of your airplane it's as easy as picking it up with your fingertips when you hold the wing right at that safe zone that we just did you want the airplane to balance straight and level if it's down like this with the tail down then it's tail-heavy and what you'll have to do is you'll have to add a little bit of no nose wait to the front of the airplane also if the airplane is like this with the nose down its nose heavy you would have to add a little bit of weight to the tail with tail heavy airplanes the airplane gets very sensitive to your control inputs and it'll lag its wings and it's going to be over controlled when you have an airplane that's too nose heavy what happens is that it is not sensitive enough to the response doesn't respond as well and you don't have as much control with the elevator when it comes time to flare the airplane for your landing so there you have it balancing your model airplane is really very easy and once you get the balance point in the place it's supposed to be it's going to allow you to fly your airplane safely for more great content be sure to go to model airplane news.com

Channel: Air Age Media

Views: 120,978

Keywords: RC, model airplane, radio control, Hitec Fun Cub XL

Id: OfDKdmcx1-E

Length: 5min 14sec (314 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2017