Hourglass problems.

So the Wichita contest was coming up and I was practicing my wittle heart out when I slapped it in inverted. Then I couldn't get anything to center after putting tip and tail weight in. Worse, everytime I tried to do an hourglass, I had this stall turn in the corner which was many a time about a foot off the ground. So I got progressively worse, ON EVERYTHING.

What was happening?

I noticed the controls seemed to be locking up from time to time and thought that perhaps the loose control line from the bellcrank was getting stopped in the too small leadout guides, so I pulled the bottom covering off the inboard wing and found a piece of balsa stuck in there. Hmmm, at least I found the rib it came from, which was a piece I was going to remove anyways.

Kay, so the covering is back on, but I'm still having problems holding inverted level and upright isn't too great either. Then it dawned on me to get a pocket watch out. Hmmmm, 3.75 laps, no wonder I was getting dizzy! And no wonder all those manuevers were getting harder to get in under the size. So I swapped to a different prop and got the lap times back down to just over 5 seconds. Oh well NOW everything is a lot simpler to fly, and theres plenty of time to get it right. But my hourglass is still hinging and stalling at the bottom, what gives? So I flew repeated hourglasses, each one getting worse till it dawned on me. While flying mach 3 pattern, I wasn't letting the dang thing go over the top of the circle. At best it was getting maybe 70 degrees. Oh, the bottom was the right size and the top took up the correct horizontal difference, but the angles were REALLLY a little on the sharp side. So I took a couple more laps, then flew the silly thing from a little past my waste to up over my right shoulder, over the center of the circle (yup you gotta lean back to see the top of the circle) over to the other shoulder, and back down to the corner by my right waste. Hey, that one almost came out without a bobble. Worcked so good I tried it again. That one came out better, so I tried it one more time and found out I was out of fuel at the 2nd top corner. Well, at least it's easy to recover from that attitude. Tomorrow I'll go out and practice it right.