After a few years without flying a scale glider, I wanted to have one again. The Arcus by Schempp-Hirth is with its unique wing shape one of the most beautiful gliders in the present so it had to be an Arcus. End of 2019 I was together with Erwin Schreiber from RC-Flight-Academy in Asia and on the flight back to Munich, 11.000 m above the ground, I placed my order for his Arcus. Right after my father joined the project and ordered a DG-1000 from him.
Due to various projects and my study we were unable to finish the gliders earlier. In a creative phase during study I drew the scheme for both gliders. Of course these 2 planes should also bear the spirit and signature of RT DESIGN. Based on this scheme I worked out another 2 versions of this livery for a new F3F glider and TSAR monoplane- more on that later!All the grey parts are 2K painted, the golden parts are realized with ORACOVER-easyplot.
As most of the customers buy the planes ready to fly, the building progress was laborius and took quite a long time. It took some effort to cut the slots and holes into the top wing of Arcus for the flap and aileron linkages. The following applied: cut and hope it was correct! All the linkages were made with high quality MP-Jet aluminum clevises and carbon tubes. The DITEX servos are all mounted in wood frames which are also available from Hacker Motor.
We wanted to install a self launching electric motor system, that we are not always dependent on a towing machine. As we have a lot of 10S packs from the F3A models, Hacker needed to arrange a power setup for 10S packs and the concept works excellent! Max current on Arcus is just around 55A and on DG-1000 it´s around 70A and a few several hundred meter climbs.
A few blowholes and areas where the white paint wnt off are needed to be mend. The good flying characterisitcs of the planes are bringing the troubles in balance. Almost no function had to be trimmed, the CG´s are reached without any extra weight in the nose, the drive dimensioning from Hacker is excellent and the super bright LED flash light make those gliders to a really successful project. Now we wait for days with good thermals to get them enough air-time!
We installed the Click-Connect system from Hacker Motor for the first time because of 5 servos in each wing plus the LED´s. That´s during building much more work, but in the end the most precious and safest solution for all the wiring and after crimping 2, 3 cables it´s quite an easy task. The result is a perfect reverse polarity protected central plug for all wires from wing to fuselage.
The power management system is a JETI model CentralBox 400 with two 2,4Ghz RSat and one 900mHz RSat. Each servo is directly connected to the CentralBox and can be programmed individually. That make the flight conditions and landing setup (airbrakes + butterfly) very easy in setting up. The CB-400 has still enough pins for the 3rd receiver and all the telemetry inputs. Telemetry from the CentralBox itself, each receiver, from the ESC (current, capacity, temperature…) and from the MVario2 are delivered in real time to the radio and gives a great overview about the safety onboard. As already installed and loved in other planes, the RC-switch is also here a must. The batteries are Hacker TopFuel ECO-X 3000mAh 2S.
I heared a lot about Tailored Pilots from England, but never had one of these pilots in my hands. After carefully checking their website it was sure that those pilots can meet our expectations. A few eMails with Wilson Li from Tailored Pilots later the order for 3 pilots were placed. What I can say after getting them is: quality, weight and detailing are surely one of the best available today. And they have a wide range of accessories to choose such as seatbelts, sunglasses, parachutes, headsets… Really nice are the RT DESIGN baseball caps he made in the correct size for our pilots.
A big “thank you” goes to Hacker Motor, JETI model, FALCON and Tailored Pilots for joining this project!
Equipment (both almost the same):
Hacker / Ditex EL 3214S
KST X10 (outer wings and stab DG-1000)
JETI Central Box 400 + RC Switch
2x RSat2
1x Rsat 900Mhz
JETI MVario2
Hacker A50-14L FES Ex-Uni
Hacker A60-7M FES Ex-Uni
FALCON folding prop white 14×10 (Arcus), 19×13 (DG-1000)
JETI Mezon opto 95
Hacker / Unilight ACL-light system glider
10S Hacker TopFuel 5100 F3A
Hacker Click-Connect
Hacker/Emcotec Premium wire
Hacker Topfuel 2x 3000 2S ECO-X, 1x 1800 3S ECO-X
Tailored Pilots 1:3 und 1:3,5
After carefully reworking the whole plane and some “weight cure” we finally made a few very successful phlights with the more than 3m long F4 Phantom from my phater. Everything works flawless!