Hunting Tip

Saw Da Dirt's post about not being shy making trim changes when the plane is flying awful. I heartily agree. Good to see someone else is not above gluing chunks of wood onto the rudder or chopping off bits of the elevator.

While working on the engine problems on the Sorta Spitfire we were playing with different mufflers. The engine had gobs more power(which I needed) on some props with the stock muffler, but the plane started to hunt. After a few flights fiddling, I moved the elevator pushrod up to get the maximum elevator travel. The hunting problem went away.

Evidently hunting is not always an aerodynamic problem. In this case a slightly nose heavy plane and slow controls would go into an oscillation. Faster controls(more gain in tech lingo) let it settle into a neutral and not overshoot.

Precisely, exactly and eloquently explained!

Carefully pick a GOOD game ranch...

I wish to add that PTG's comment comes, as I recall, from having this exact problem with his Olympic, a model he was at one time ready to thoroughly trash. But which now flies quite well.

Some of the stuff we run into defies common sense and/or intuition. Further, a lot of it falls well outside the parameters of PW's flow chart for trimming, as good and comprehensive as that document may be.

Last fall my Zilch X, a real simple and basic model, was tuned to my satisfaction, Don McClave and I sharing it to take first and second--hey! quit poking me with that sharp stick, Don won, I admit it--in OTS. Since then I have added quite a lot more nose weight, moved leadouts forward, reduced elevator throw slightly, removed what seemed like a trivial amount of tip weight.

It's better. I look forward to further changes, some of which may actually help. Or teach me something. Either result will be fine, although both will be preferred.

I wish to futher add that the two Phil's problems, my further tuning of Mr. Zilch, could not in any real way be helped along by input on this forum, no matter the intentions behind all the sage advice.

You guys can continue to ask for this sort of advice, much of it will apply. But until you start fiddling, even to excess, which is pretty much what I am into now, it's going to be a long, hard road...