Aprilamille's (Mike's) VPModels' Cubic build

[apriliamille]

Well, the wings are done and buttoned up. All i can really say is that i now here by decree that the name of those little green connectors for making a single plug in for all the servo wires is now officially a curse word and if anyone ever says the name in whisper our normal voice has to pay a buck to the swear jar.

This was actually my third attempt at the little green things. the first time i was all messed up using my huge super hero soldering iron, then i got an actual new solder iron that random tips are compatible to. the second attempt my friend and i did the little green things but i forgot my servo tester / radio / receiver. we glued into the wing and when i got back to my house and tested the servos in the wing. If i plugged in one servo connector to the tester nothing happened in the wing. if i plugged in the other servo connector nothing happened in the wing. If i plugged in both connectors to the tester both servos worked. well ##@@!@@ and the darned green things were glued in. we crossed the signal wire inside the wing.

I exacto knifed the green thing out of the wing end and removed ALL the servo wire in the wing. I glued up a new connector and then tested on a multi meter. I learned that even the signal wire will reflect on a multi meter when you move the knob on the servo tester. After both servo wires worked properly in the green thing i then re routed the servo wire through the wing for the third time. This time was actually fast to do. If you read my earlier posts you might have seen where routing the wire in the wing kicked my butt !. But now i had the floss, CA and kicker so i glued the wire to the floss and routed the floss glued to a piano wire and got them all in place and soldered up the servos. The kit came with some i dont know what but it looks like really thin sticker carbon fiber sheets. It felt stronger than "stickers" but it looks like carbon fiber and has adhesive on the back. and these got put onto the servo bays. I have blister covers that are white and i am pondering painting them orange or black and put them on to help with protection while landing or what not. I have not decided.

I am at a stalemate until my motor and spinner, prop adapter get here. The motor (not aloft fault) has decided to take a tour of America. It went from California, to the Salt lake City distribution center (50 miles from my house) then it went to Conneticut then Jersey and now is touring Texas so who knows when it will get here. I need the motor as i need to know where and how I am going to layout the electronics. I moved to a bigger esc now that i have more information on the motor and prop combos i am going to use. I suspect the RX is going to go on one of the inside walls of the fuse and my servo tray elevator servo arm will have to face inside and not outside in the servo tray. I wont know until the motor gets here and i determine the firewall spot

Its sunday and i plan to work on something today since i can go no more forward till all the stuff gets here so i might pull out and start working on the CCM 2m toy

The whole reason for the nightmare on the wing servo wire and connectors is because I want to standardize my planes. The CCM is pretty much turn key all the green connectors are in and mounted. They are opposite hard mounted positions than the ones that can be bought from the rc shops. AKA the no pins showing pieces is on the wing and the U shaped pins showing are on the fuse. The painless no fuss no muss pre built servo harnesses have the U shaped pins exposed are the wing harness and the no pins showing piece is a "fuse" harness.

But i can tell you this, I will never care one ounce again about standardizing as I did not find the 20 or so hour process of doing hand made wiring harnesses and routing into the wings 3 separate times not very enjoyable. I will buy the pre builts as they are and not look back

 

[apriliamille]

So the light is in the tunnel which is cool and im excited about. All that is needed now is to determine where the motor and firewall is going to be glued in. put on the spinner and prop, determine the elevator servo arm and the electronics layout and then to throws and cg stuff

 

[Wayne]

No great value in matching the wiring from one plane to the next. Ideally once wired you will never need to mess with these plugs again. At least I never have. Yes, they are a full on pain in the butt. I'd have plane builds stall out as I just did not want to do this step. Once I finally jumped into it, it was not that bad and I'd kick myself for not doing it long before because I could have been enjoying the model.

We are always looking for better ways to deal with these things, and have purchased many different connectors hoping to make a better solution. The Green things do the job well and can carry the current. Anyhow, for more standardized models we offer wire harnesses pre made here, and far cheaper than anyone else. We have sold thousands of them, and only recently heard a report of one being made with an error. That is a pretty good ratio.

I'll say you got off easy for a wiring error. Much more common is to fry servos. You put the power to the wrong pins and the magic smoke leaves. So, could have been worse! I watched a well known pilot building a model kill 2 sets of servos making the same wiring mistake twice. Ouch.

 

[apriliamille]

next time im buying your pre built. they were not standardized to what the ccm has so i made them this time

 

[apriliamille]

so my hands are more shaky then normal and i do not have a normal camera just my phone camera so these are blurry. The Top F2925-8 arrived after it's tour of America. it looks like m3x6 will work just fine for the firewall that came with the Cubic kit. I am not too keen on the diameter vs the inside diameter of the fuse nose. my spinner stuff is on the way and then i will think more on it. i wont know for sure until that comes but currently i do not like the slight "space" from the firewall to the end of the fuse nose. I dont really want to cut the fuse, i do not know anyone with a lathe to properly turn the firewall down with some emery cloth. maybe chuck it into a drill press and spin it and sand on it. Or i just could be way way way extremely over thinking the whole thing.

p.s. i might be having a complex as well after thinking I "scared" @Tmcfarland away from building one

 

[Tmcfarland]

so my hands are more shaky then normal and i do not have a normal camera just my phone camera so these are blurry. The Top F2925-8 arrived after it's tour of America. it looks like m3x6 will work just fine for the firewall that came with the Cubic kit. I am not too keen on the diameter vs the inside diameter of the fuse nose. my spinner stuff is on the way and then i will think more on it. i wont know for sure until that comes but currently i do not like the slight "space" from the firewall to the end of the fuse nose. I dont really want to cut the fuse, i do not know anyone with a lathe to properly turn the firewall down with some emery cloth. maybe chuck it into a drill press and spin it and sand on it. Or i just could be way way way extremely over thinking the whole thing.

p.s. i might be having a complex as well after thinking I "scared" @Tmcfarland away from building one

You did’nt scare me away. Its on my list. Just completed and flying a 3 meter Hoillien Introduction kit from Germany.

 

[Wayne]

Very nice. How do you like it?

 

[apriliamille]

oh man, that is sexy looking and that color combo is spot on. And i am terrible as i zoom in on the picture and see palm trees !!!!!!! wanna trade homes and palm trees and 20 degree temps?

 

[Tmcfarland]

oh man, that is sexy looking and that color combo is spot on. And i am terrible as i zoom in on the picture and see palm trees !!!!!!! wanna trade homes and palm trees and 20 degree temps?

Thank you, yes It’s So Cal. Lots of problems here but the weather is great. Great to fly year round and I have a club flying site very close by. Here is another. Bird of Time with modified tail.
Tom

 

[apriliamille]

Every thing is here !!!!!!! Im doing my CCM Toy v tail tray tonight as i thought the rest of my prop stuff would deliver tommorrow but it came early. Pretty much left

1. shape the firewall to get flush to the front of the nose and glue it in.
2. Mount the motor and spinner and prop
3. program the talon 60 and solder on the connectors (im gonna go with the smallest bullets i can get away with as i dont want bulky xt30 60 what nots in the way
4. mount up the RX
5. put antenna fairing thingies.


So i saw in that video @Wayne share i think on page 1 of that bubble surfer. It had some gadgets on the side of that plane, or was it his other sansibear. anyhow there were like aero grips that you could use for a grasp for momentum. So i have these to route antenna through and they are rock solid. I wonder if I JB weld these to the side with maybe a dowel could i use them as leverage for chucking

MK Composites Clear Antenna Fairings - Clear

Clear antenna exit fairings that are nice and long and rigid. See pictures for dimensions. Sold in Pairs. Plane not included.

alofthobbies.com

I know back in the day i use to "pin" my 50cc and up firewalls with bamboo sticks so im pondering a "pin" into the side of the fuse to help with sturdiness

 

[apriliamille]

Well, I only have room for one plane in the hobby room on the work bench for epoxy. I wont use the giant table i have in the man cave that i have set up for CG and what nots due to me rescuing a 6 year old cat from the rescue center the first week of January. I dont want the cat to climb up and bump anything while epoxy dries so behind a closed door it sits. In the various photos i have seen on the Django, Cubic and Nobody I have noticed some of the white bowden exterior is protuding. I took a Testors black gloss marker pen and painted the white portion of this tube to be black and i painted the epoxy "mound" that i didnt want to really sand on anymore in caution of reducing durabilty at the exit points of the boom.

I also got my Amazon delivery of Pinewood derby graphite this morning and for who knows why at the moment i opened the package I decided to poof a bit down into the tubes even though I am not ready to set up the rear linkages to the servos in the fuse.

I sanded a little bit on the firewall and got it to where I think it is similar to what I saw on the VP site but a lot smaller gap. They have a build pdf for the Django and for the Nobody and they show just a slight space from the firewall to the edge of the nose. I think mine is a little smaller gap though as i sanded on the firewall. Due to my shakiness of my hand and my lack of experience on the proper mixtures of epoxy and fiberglass shards / cabosil. I drove down to the hardware store and got a bolt and nut that fits good in the firewall center and bolted it up to the firewall. That way I dont accidentally get epoxy on the motor and risk being out the cost of another one. Right now its 30 minute with fiberglass shards and is curing. I intend when that is cured to where I can move the fuse around i will probably make a fillet of more 30 min epoxy and the cabosil to run around that slim gap since the spinner is not going to fit in that gap from what i could tell.

Why am I thinking of doing this? Cuz i will probably do something stupid. I had always determined on using the X power 2925-8 or the 2915-12, it was just a matter of which one on my 'mock cg test" would help the most with cg.

I found real world (not a motor calculator) statistics on those 2 motors with various propellers and I got props now that can push 1600-2000 grams of thrust on the 2925-8. Hey an age old saying when I grew up "there is no replacement for cubic displacement, you can always throttle back"

But lets be real, there will be some random times of "crank it"

 

[apriliamille]

Well it was a cranky day working on it. Nothing seemed to go right. Ends up I did not feel comfortable with 3/4 of the prop shaft adapter on the shaft and by god i got 100 percent coverage with some files, dremel and sandpaper. But now my spinner looks stupid mated up to the front of the fuse

I randomly put in 2 pics for je ne sais quoi. It seems like working on this glider some optical boosters are my new best friend. I dont recall having to use one of these devices for soo long. Back when I did rc helis for a brief stint in 2007-2010, My eyes were good back then. I also have a pic of a piece of plastic with loctite. I have no clue if this is common knowledge but when i built helis, i would tip the very end edge of the screw into the locktite and spin it on a clean spot then mount it into the motor and firewall. I cant stand loctite gunk build up especially back when helis were pre flight controllers and crashes were the norm with tons of rebuilding and repairing servos and frames.

It seems that my hardware is just too damn big for this project. My Jet clevices were too big, my surface horns were too big.. everything is too big. I cannibalized er "controlled substitution" from a tiny park flyer some tiny servo linkage to use. I got the rudder done and now to figure out what the heck am i going to do with the elevator. that one pic showing the wire not lining up with the surface horn is my elevator. I did not get the rudder throw i would like but what do i know about a lightweight glider. This is much throw i could get with the fuse servo placement and the servo horn barely not rubbing the side of the fuse.

Its under some epoxy and fiberglass again. Some how I have a some what loose bowden up near the servo area but man just conveniently in the way so one time when i put the wing tube into the fuse i kinked the exterior bowden. I have various carbon tubes and i was able to slide a carbon tube over the white bowden tube and then its curing now. All i need is for that kink to not have reinforcement and have it break in the future.

 

[apriliamille]

Well according to my books..... THE BUILD IS DONE !!!!. thank god. next saturday my friend and i are going to try and meet up at his shop to finalize the throws, locktite the tail and fuse connectors and trim the extra steel wire. Before life happened 4 years ago I ordered a blue "large digital scale" from Aloft. I guess I finally get to use it.

The elevator throw has more up than down since the elevator smacks the boom. But I assume I wont need that much throw. I have a TW SR10 but i wont be using the stabilization. I have the receiver and I wanted the TW 10 as it has 3 antenna. When i bound it up and made sure the stabilization was off it looks like the accelerometers still work as I went into the telemetry scan option in the 20RS and it found altitude and vertical speed so i wont need to put a vario in plane

I did not want to butcher the little 4 pin plug and wire set that came with the receiver as these I see are rather scarce to find independently from buying a receiver but I split a servo wire and left only the positive wire and soldered this to the esc battery positive connector so I can have the analog volt reading. Outside of battery volts and Vario off of the RX i see no other telemetry needed.

So those who followed along will know this is my first actual real mccoy glider build (i dont count that rapid im building as an actual build as its rather ARF along with the CCM". Thank god for my friend and suggestions from others as I was clueless on tons of stuff.

So would I do this again? Well I sure hope I get lots and lots of hours out of this glider as I do not want to do this again.

The fuse servo picture shows an arrow locator. This is where i had to add some carbon tube to reinforce the bowden structure. I still need to clean this up some (not like i am going to have people "ohhhhhh and ahhhhhh" over the internals of the plane) I also got some hanger rash while building. This is the foam D box Cubic not the carbon Cubic so some crap happened. I had a black sharpie so i darkened the area so it was not raw foam and i have some thin "lam" i dont know what its called it was introduced to me as "lam" from Chris back in the day from Ritewing. I heated some up over the hanger rash areas

When the cg is done and all the masking tape is gone and i run some acetone over it, ill share some final pics

 

[apriliamille]

I have no pictures. but today we put it on a blue digital CG machine that I got from Aloft 4 ish years ago. I really dont understand how it works and its blue but we put the glider on it and pushed the wing up to the vertical pins. it gave us a rear post weight a front post weight and a combined weight and a cg. the glider posted cg range is 75-85. Right out the gate we hit 82 cg !!! with a total of 1122 grams !!!!

My glider friend and I fist bumped and he said "good job with the math, its been a long time since ive seen a plane right away not need any weight at all to make CG"

This weight was with a pulse 3s 860. i also have a thunderpower 3s 1300 that i place in there but did not shoe horn for a full fit and it lined up at 78 ish cg.

Even though I do not want to build another plane like this I have to say I am rather proud of the accomplishment. I told my friend it was all on him for the end product but of course he says "oh nah, all i did was supervise"

 

[Tmcfarland]

I have no pictures. but today we put it on a blue digital CG machine that I got from Aloft 4 ish years ago. I really dont understand how it works and its blue but we put the glider on it and pushed the wing up to the vertical pins. it gave us a rear post weight a front post weight and a combined weight and a cg. the glider posted cg range is 75-85. Right out the gate we hit 82 cg !!! with a total of 1122 grams !!!!

My glider friend and I fist bumped and he said "good job with the math, its been a long time since ive seen a plane right away not need any weight at all to make CG"

This weight was with a pulse 3s 860. i also have a thunderpower 3s 1300 that i place in there but did not shoe horn for a full fit and it lined up at 78 ish cg.

Even though I do not want to build another plane like this I have to say I am rather proud of the accomplishment. I told my friend it was all on him for the end product but of course he says "oh nah, all i did was supervise"

Looking forward to your first flight report. What would you say was the most difficult part of the build?

 

[apriliamille]

we are targeting April 2 for the flight. its my birthday. either it will be a glorious birthday or a horrible one if it dirt darts.

for me there was 3 areas that were hard.

1. i have a small house with not alot of open space. so the hardest was not having open space. you can see alot of the pics are from my friends work where there was tons of space
2. i ended up doing the wiring in the wings 3 times. This was hard for me with lots of cussing and anger as I have never really done harnesses with those dirty word little green thing connectors
3. knowledge. I have never built something like this and if it wasnt for my friend i would have been clueless and it would still not have been built

 

[gp49]

A little late to read this post, but here is a little diagram I have stolen from the internet and using to build my harnesses, all in the same manner using the real 'green' things, with a good female servo connector. Supper easy to solder. Each servo connector get a shrink tube and then the whole end piece gets molded hot glue outside protection (I have made some molds, but there are plenty of .stl files for printing your own)

For skinny fuses I have gotten some connectors printed for me (printed circuit board service) so that the wiring gets attached at a 90 degree angle.

 

[apriliamille]

well my birthday is tomorrow and we hope to put it up for its maiden tommorrow. As we watch 4 inches of snow on the ground right now...
everything is set up and programmed the X20 RS with a twin sr10 with the gyro off (didnt want to buy another receiver as i had to pay out to uncle Sam for april 15) so I can use the internal gyro what not as an altitude sensor and the analog input is set up as volt and calibrated. We did the final throws off my friends eyeballs and "feel" He has been doing this for 25 something freaking years so I trust him and he felt good with what we got. we did not really do flap camber since this plane literally has almost nothing in flaps going up but we got some aileron camber for thermal, cruise and speed

I ended up with a CCM 12x8 slim prop and a CN 'U" Spinner.. And of course it was not an out of the box fit as I would expect nothing less during this entire build This is running on Top Model XPower F2925-8 Windy 1380KV

This a photo of what i had to do to get the CCM prop to get clearance. The spinner has some damage with my first spool up with me not realizing it was not a direct fit and the props slammed into the spinner. I had no prior experience or knowledge so I had no clue what I was doing with it. I pretty much mounted up the props onto the prop adapter and then rotated them with full range on sandpaper to get them to clear. That blue arrow is I dont remember.. its a bag of women clear hair tie back thingies i cant remember the name of them to assist with spring back of the props, The yellow highlight is the range of motion on sand paper and the red line shows the damage of initial spool up

 

[Red]

Well happy early birthday and good luck with the maiden if you get a chance to pull it off!

 

[Doc J]

well my birthday is tomorrow and we hope to put it up for its maiden tommorrow. As we watch 4 inches of snow on the ground right now...
everything is set up and programmed the X20 RS with a twin sr10 with the gyro off (didnt want to buy another receiver as i had to pay out to uncle Sam for april 15) so I can use the internal gyro what not as an altitude sensor and the analog input is set up as volt and calibrated. We did the final throws off my friends eyeballs and "feel" He has been doing this for 25 something freaking years so I trust him and he felt good with what we got. we did not really do flap camber since this plane literally has almost nothing in flaps going up but we got some aileron camber for thermal, cruise and speed

I ended up with a CCM 12x8 slim prop and a CN 'U" Spinner.. And of course it was not an out of the box fit as I would expect nothing less during this entire build This is running on Top Model XPower F2925-8 Windy 1380KV

This a photo of what i had to do to get the CCM prop to get clearance. The spinner has some damage with my first spool up with me not realizing it was not a direct fit and the props slammed into the spinner. I had no prior experience or knowledge so I had no clue what I was doing with it. I pretty much mounted up the props onto the prop adapter and then rotated them with full range on sandpaper to get them to clear. That blue arrow is I dont remember.. its a bag of women clear hair tie back thingies i cant remember the name of them to assist with spring back of the props, The yellow highlight is the range of motion on sand paper and the red line shows the damage of initial spool up

Please be very careful and don't stand in line with that prop.

Doc.