BOT - Bird of Time

2004.10.29

The Bird of Time is a classic, a must have!
A 3m RE or RES poly wing sailplane.
Mine was built by Gabriel / AeroDragon around nov/2003.

Truth is I wasn't satisfied at all with the construction of mine... I asked spoilers to be built into the wing, but they came with the hinge on the back of the spoilers!?!?!?! Someday I will change that but for now I just sealed the spoilers down and am using it with only rudder and elevator controls.

Another big problem is a major wash-in twist in the left wing root panel... On the first flight I didn't realize the enormous incidence difference on the wings and launched it that way... disaster, of course! But sturdy as it is, it survived the crash quite well... On a second flight I still didn't knew what was the reason for the strange behaviour but was prepared for it... kept a lot of left rudder during all the flight and landed safely. At last I realized what the problem was and solved it with a big shim on the TE of the left wing. I thought of straightening the root panel but beeing that the wing has a very strong sheeted D-box construction, I decided not to do that yet...

I orderd it with a chopped nose so I could later fit an electric motor in it. I'm not sure if I'll ever install a motor in it, but for now it's beeing useful to house the absurd 250g ballast as much up front as possible to get the CG at the wing spar.

AUW is a whooping 1.8Kg, which is not much for a 3m wingspan, 69dm2 wing area sailplane (26g/dm2 wing-loading) but I'd really have liked it better if it had weighted around 1.2Kg (17g/dm2 wing-loading)...

The canopy was lost on the first flight crash and I shaped a foam canopy wrapped in FG tape... It's very badly done, but I really don't feel like spending too much time on this plane right now.

The incredible part is that it flies very well. So far I've only flown it at the slope and don't even have a hook fitted to the fuse, but eventually I'll have it ready for a hi-start / winch launch.