 What's up everybody? Welcome to Rotor Riot. I'm Let's Fly RC, and today I'm going to show you how to build this, my new signature airframe, the Riot Wing. Normally on Rotor Riot, we fly freestyle FPV drones. High-performance drones that can do amazing things. I get bored sometimes, and I like to make these crazy projects to entertain myself and you guys. And one of the things that I like to do on the site is fly airplanes. It's a lot of fun. It's a little bit different than flying drones, and I think you guys will enjoy it. But to try to help you guys get started in that process, I wanted to make an airplane that was going to be durable, easy to fly for a beginner, but at the same time be able to have the performance to make me happy as an experienced pilot in order to fly super fast and freestyle like the best of them. This is a pretty extensive build process. It's a little bit more advanced and it takes a lot longer, so be patient and we'll get through it. Some of the things that you need for this build, obviously we're going to be the airframe, which comes in a cardboard box like this. You'll get that from RotorRat.com. Along with your airframe, you'll need to pick up an electronics package, and we're going to try to make that easy to find all the pieces that you need and potentially even put them together in a package that you can buy all in one. In the package, you'll probably find the ESC, two servos, a BEC battery eliminator circuit, a receiver, and if you want to add lights to the drone, a set of LEDs, some control horns and control rods, and of course the Let's Fly RC 4S motor. If you're going to put FPV on it, you'll need an FPV pod which you can pick up at RotorRat.com and potentially a FPV camera system. This plane works best with the Avatar HD system because the Avatar HD system has a built-in voltage monitor and can put the voltage of your battery on screen display automatically without having to have a separate flight controller. I would love to use it with some of the other systems, but unfortunately some of the other systems such as DGI don't actually give you your on-screen voltage, so you'll be guessing the whole time as to what your battery voltage is. This airplane is going to be run straight off the receiver, so everything will be manual controls. There's not going to be any auto-stabilization, any GPS hold or anything like that. Some of the other items you might need for this build is some extra wire. 32 gauge works really well for wiring up your LED lights and your FPV gear. I like to use this pigtail that we sell in the RotorRat store. For the OG original DGI air unit it's a nice silicone cable and it comes with multiple colors so you can use it for your video system or your LED lights. Some tools that you might need for this build are a heat gun, different types of glues for the installation, and I'll go over that later in the video. A drill, an iron, and it can be a standard clothes iron or a fancy iron like this for doing laminate. Sandpaper, possibly a carbon spar to strengthen up your control rods. Some heat shrink, some snap razor blades, a sharpie marker, a hacksaw blade, and a servocintering tool. Now we've got that out of the way, let's go ahead and get started on the build. In the box you're going to have your laminate for the coating of the airplane. The two wing halves, your elevons, all of your plastic bits and motor mount, and fiberglass spars. I'm going to settle these bits aside and we're going to start with the two wing halves. First thing I like to do is figure out the proper orientation of these airplane wings. If you take the wing out of its core, you'll be able to line them up together, try to keep them semi-organized like this so you can tell which wing goes in which core because we're going to use that in the future here. We're going to use the wing cores to help us to keep these wings straight as we build them. So the airplane goes together like this and in the foam you can see the laser cutouts where all of your wing spars go, and we've also included light channels in case you want to add LED lights to this plane. The top and the bottom are not the same. The bottom of the airplane has a channel cutout for the electronics bay and a channel cutout for the battery bay. Where the top of the airplane only has the electronics bay cutout and the battery bay doesn't have a perimeter around it. I like to use the cores that come with the airplane to help keep the airplane straight during the build process. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut along the front edge here on both of these airframe cores to allow me to use one half at a time to set the wing on top of it as I'm building it and that will help to keep the airframe straight as we build it. Now that I have the airframe and the airframe core cutout, I will be able to work better on the table here and this will keep the airframe straight as I build it. Before we go into gluing anything together, I like to go around and cut out the channels for the battery bay and the electronics bay ahead of time. Before gluing the plane together, it just makes things go a little smoother and a little faster. There are two ways you can cut these channels out. You can either use a snap blade like I'm going to do or you can use a hacksaw blade. The hacksaw blade allows you to be a little bit more precise, but it does make a lot more mess. Whenever I cut out the motor mount in the back here, the hacksaw blade takes away a lot of the foam. We're going to need to fit not only the motor mount in here, but also a spar top and bottom so we need as much thickness of the foam as possible. So even though Chris Click over at right wing recommends using a hacksaw blade for this step, I'm going to be using the razor blade so that I can keep as much foam in place as possible so that I can have maximum durability of the airplane. The first locations we're trying to cut out are where the battery bay goes and the electronics bay goes on this airframe. We want to take a note as to the thickness of these two items and we're going to try to cut away enough foam to allow these two pieces of plastic to notch down and flush mount inside this airframe. The battery bay is made of ABS plastic. It's very durable and it will go on the bottom of the airframe right about here. The solid rectangular piece is going to go on the bottom of the airframe for your electronics bay and it will mount right here. Similarly, the vented piece of plastic will go in the same location on the other side of the wing and this will be the top of your electronics bay. In order to make these plastic bits fit into the airframe, we're going to need to cut out the foam. We're going to go ahead and take our snap blade and place it into the foam and cut away enough material to where these three rectangular plastic pieces will notch into the frame and flush mount into the airframe. We try to make it as easy as possible for you by giving you a pattern to work with. Now that that's cut out, you can see how the battery tray fits in there. Nice and flush with the airframe. These notch right in there and they fit flush with the airframe. Now do the same thing to the other side and flip the airplane over and get the bottom of the electronics bay as well. Be sure to build on a flat surface when building this airplane so that you end up with a straight wing when your build is finished. The top of the electronics bay should flush mount right on top just like that. Now we have those pieces cut out. We're going to go ahead and cut out our motor mount location. This is your metal motor mount and it will be cut into the foam right back here. Half of it will go into one side of the airframe and the other half will go into the other side of the airframe. Where the motor mounts right here is where I'd like to have this metal piece line up to. So I'm going to need to cut out that much of the foam in order to make it fit and try to be as straight as possible during this process. Now all this metal piece isn't going to be used. We're going to end up cutting off the motor mount at this notch right here when finished. So don't worry about the fact that the metal is going to be sticking out the back of the airframe. We're going to be cutting some of that off. For now we're going to go ahead and take our snap blade and we're going to try to make it as perfectly centered as possible as we make this cut and cut right down the middle of the airframe and give the motor mount a place to live. This is one of the most important steps to make sure that your motor is lined up perfectly with the airframe nice and straight because if you do this wrong your motor is going to be pointing the wrong direction causing your airplane to try to shift its direction. Now that I've cut those two slots I'm going to dry fit the motor mount in the foam and see how it fits and if I need to make any adjustments to that. Definitely need to make an adjustment to that. Oh I didn't cut it straight. If you've cut it properly the back of the motor mount and the back of the airframe should be flush and everything should be straight and lined up true. The next step after dry fitting your motor mount and cutting out the reliefs for the battery bay and electronics bay is to glue the two airframe halves together. There are different kinds of glue that you can use for this step. Some people use hot glue, some people use E6000, Goop, welder glue, and we'll even have our own type of glue in the Rotorite store very soon that you guys can purchase if you want to buy it at Rotorite.com. For this step I'm going to use welder glue which is my favorite glue to use for this step. I'm going to place a generous amount of glue on each of the three sections of the centerpiece of this airframe. I'm going to take the two halves and temporarily join them together and wiggle them around a little bit so that the glue adheres to both surfaces and then I'm going to pull them apart. I'm going to use my finger to spread the glue around and then we're going to set it aside to dry for about 15 minutes. Once it gets tacky then we can put it together. Yeah, don't do something about this coffee table guys. That's why I like a glass table. While that's drying let's prepare some of the electronics that we'll need later. My Let's Fly RC solder free motor comes with an MR30 connector on it for ease of connecting and disconnecting and replacing the motor in the future if you ever need to. Sold separately you can buy female side of that MR30 connector which we can solder up to our ESC. I'm going to wait to do this until later because I want to feed these wires through the foam of the airframe before I solder it onto the ESC. But in the meantime we're going to go ahead and do our power connections on our ESC, the battery eliminator circuit and I'm even going to hook up an extra power lead for my FPV gear and for my LED lights for later installation. On our battery eliminator circuit we have an in positive, an out positive and two grounds. So we're going to take our ground and our in lead and we're going to send those to the battery voltage which is going to be the thick positive and thick negative on the ESC. We're going to send the out positive and negative to our receiver which is also going to power our servos. On this electronics speed controller there are two terminals meant for a capacitor to be soldered to later. We're going to use those two terminals to put additional battery leads off of our ESC so that we can use those terminals for our LED lights and FPV gear later. These pigtail leads will be available in Rotorite.com and this is what I'm going to use to power my FPV gear later and this is also what I'm going to be using for my receiver to give it power. This lead is going to be used for battery voltage or the FPV gear later and I'm going to go ahead and tin these leads and attach it to the capacitor location on the ESC along with two additional power leads for my FPV gear later. For one of these sets of wires I'm going to use the outer leads and for one of these sets of wires I'm going to use the inner leads it'll just make my life easier when attaching all of these wires to the ESC because there are so many of them. I'm going to go ahead and tin the two leads that are labeled capacitor. That's where I'll be hooking my LED wires and I'm going to tin the two wires for my FPV gear and I'll be hooking those to the two thicker leads where the battery wires come in. Now that I've added a little bit of extra solder to these battery leads it'll be easier for me to mate the smaller power cables for my FPV gear. Just like that. I'm going to take two of these silicone wires and go ahead and attach it to the ESC for my LED lights. Make sure the red goes on the side with the red and the black goes on the side with the black. There we go. Just to make things a little bit cleaner I'm going to go ahead and twist these two 32 gauge wires just so they stay together and out of the way and I'm going to make sure that the other end of these wires are not touching and not exposed by pulling out on the silicone coating with my fingernails and making sure that the wire does not come exposed and that way it won't accidentally short out in the future when we go to hook up a battery. You can use an ESC that has a built-in BEC battery eliminator circuit if you choose but I've noticed that this particular ESC performs the best in this airplane for high performance maneuvers without any issues. Unfortunately this ESC that I've chosen does not have a built-in battery eliminator circuit so we have to wire up our own. We'll need one more set of power leads to this electronic speed controller to power the battery eliminator circuit. I'm going to go ahead and add those on top of the FPV wiring that I created earlier just by adding a little bit more solder to the top which gives me the ability to dab on another wire. To recap, the power leads that we're going to need off of this electronic speed controller are a power lead for our battery eliminator circuit. We'll need a power lead for our LED lights if you choose to put lighting in your airplane, a power lead for your FPV gear and we're going to need our input power from our battery which is going to go to an XT60 lead later in the build. The wires we've allotted for the battery eliminator circuit we're going to wire those up next. Let's go ahead and strip and tin the positive and negative leads. I'm going to go ahead and tin all four leads at the same time on the battery eliminator circuit. We're going to take our positive and negative lead. We're going to hook the red wire to where it says N on the BEC because that is the N voltage and right next to it is a G for ground. We're going to hook the black wire to that. On the other side of the BEC I'm going to attach a female JST connector because a JST connector naturally fits well on to our receiver. This is an ER4 Radiomaster Express LRS receiver and it works really well for airplanes without a flight controller. Any four channel receiver will work just fine for this process and everything should wire up the same but this is the one we chose to use for this demonstration and this is the one that I recommend. As you can see I can attach this JST connector right into the positive and negative pins of this receiver in the spare port that we're not going to be using, port number four and that's going to give it the five volts that it needs to power the receiver and the servos. The red wire of the JST connector is going to get attached to the out of the BEC because that's going to be the five volt output of the battery eliminator circuit and the black will go to the G for ground. This is all of the preliminary wiring we want to do to ensure the next steps in the wing assembly process. Now that our 15-minute timer has gone off let's go ahead and reattach our airplane wing halves. Just make sure that you have the proper side up. Start lining the pieces up together and press them together once you've got them lined up properly. Since this is contact adhesive pressing the two wing halves together after it's tacked up will make a permanent bond. Now that our two wing halves have been joined to the spar installation. Since that glue bonded together my motor mount location I'm going to go ahead and take the razor blade and just open it back up and dry fit the motor mount one more time. As a matter of fact it's easiest to go ahead and glue this motor mount in next before we do the spars. That way when we do cut our spars in they'll have something to lay against. So let's go ahead and install our motor mount now. To this we're going to go ahead and grab our welder's glue and we're going to squirt a generous amount into the slot that we created making sure that our motor mount's going to stay in there nice and tight and let's slide our motor mount up in there and wiggle it around a little bit to make sure that the glue adheres to the motor mount and keeps it in place and then line it up and make sure that it is very straight and true to the center of the wing and to the back edge of the wing. This step is very important to make sure that the motor is pointing in the proper direction. Now we're going to go ahead and grab our wing cores and we're going to start to dry fit our spars. In the package you'll find a whole bunch of fiberglass spars and we're going to use those to make the airplane nice and strong and rigid and straight. If you look closely you'll see some laser cut lines in the airframe and those lines are where we're going to be inserting our spars. We're going to try to install all the spars top and bottom before we do any gluing to make sure that the airframe is straight and true before adding any glue. We're going to go ahead and take our snap razor blade and just lightly score the pre-laser etched lines to allow for the fiberglass spars to seat down into the foam and end up with a flush top surface. Don't cut too deep and cut all the way through the airplane. We only want to cut down about one eighth to one quarter of an inch. So we're just lightly dragging the razor blade across those score lines and then if we take our fiberglass spars press them into that score line if done properly our fiberglass spars will be flush into the airplane and you shouldn't feel it across the top edge of the wing after inserting it. Be sure when inserting the spar that you don't cross over into your electronics bay. Give yourself a little bit of gap there and at the end over here we can just go ahead and take our wire cutters and cut off the excess. Just continue that process for all of the additional spar locations. We'll go through them real quick on camera so you can see all the different locations where we insert these spars. Do that top and bottom before moving on to the next step which is gluing the spars into position. There we go. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight spars that we inserted. Top and bottom. And all these spars should be under the foam so that when we laminate it we're not going to be touching any of the fiberglass spars. We want to only be touching the foam. If the spars stick up over the foam they're going to bulge in the laminate and it'll just be a little bit harder to laminate in the future. Now that we have all of our spars inserted we want to make sure that the airframe is straight by looking at it in this direction just to verify that the airframe is completely straight all the way down the leading edge and all the way down the trailing edges. If it's not straight in any area you can simply bend it a little bit to make it straight. We want to make sure we do this before adding any glue so that when we're finished it's straight and true. Now that I've verified that my airframe is straight and true down both leading edges and the trailing edges we're going to go ahead and add the CA glue that's going to lock these spars in place. Be sure to do this in a well ventilated area because this glue emits a very strong odor. This CA glue is what we're going to use today. We'll have our own version of this CA glue in Rotorite.com. It is a medium gap filling CA glue with the CA glue activator as well. Go ahead and apply a generous amount of this CA glue that's activated. I usually do one side of the airframe at a time after putting down one layer of CA glue wait about five minutes come back and put down a second layer wait about five more minutes for the CA glue to seep into the foam and then we'll come back and spray all the glue with the activator afterwards. If you choose to add lights to your airframe this cob lighting available at Rotorite.com is amazing for lighting up the foam and turning it into a candle. If you choose to add a candle to your airframe this is going to be a good lighting about 20 inches long or 51 centimeters approximately. We're going to go ahead and wire up the positive and negative to this cobs LED strip while we're waiting for the glue to dry. If you peel back on the double-sided tape it's labeled positive and negative. We're going to tend the two positive and negative leads on the wires we're going to attach and then we're going to tend the two pads on the LED strip this step is a lot easier to do. Now that my soldering iron is clean go ahead and attach my positive and negative to the lights here and repeat that process on a second LED strip for the other side. Before inserting this LED strip into your airframe and permanently laminate it in place it's always a good idea to make sure that it actually works so let's go ahead and plug it into a forest battery and just make sure that we did a good job soldering that light. Now that our glue has seeped into all the cracks and we have applied a second coat and allowed that glue to seep into the cracks we're going to go ahead and spray a generous amount of activator to activate all that glue so I'm just going to spray all those areas with the activator again be sure to do this in a nice well ventilated area because this will create a lot of toxic fumes and wait another 5 minutes for that to dry before flipping the wing over and repeating the process on the other side alright all the glue has been drying then glue is now all dry and activated we're going to go ahead and install the lights then we're going to put another layer of spray glue down to help the laminate it here better to the foam and then we're going to laminate the wing but first let's go ahead and install the lights this is an optional step if you want to go ahead and install lights on your airframe then now's the time to do it we've pre-cut these slots with the laser for you guys so you can have a pattern to go off of and we've left some sections where it's not cut through for strength in case you decide not to use the lights in order to install the lights we need to use the soldering iron or some kind of a tool to cut away these slots before inserting the lights we're just basically cutting halfway through the wing with this razor blade so that we can try to get the LED lights to be centered so I'm just cutting away all these channels here I'm just going to cut the spar right here to allow the lights to go through we're going to take the LED light and face it towards the leading edge of the wing and insert it into the channel there just by pressing it down just like we did with the spars if your LED lights just a little bit long you can extend the channel after you've inserted the LED into the channel we need to create a notch for the wires to reach back into our electronics bay by creating a slot with the razor blade I'm just barely cutting in about a quarter of an inch into the foam when I lay the laminated across the top here it will reinforce that area before moving on to laminate let's go ahead and verify that the light works still now that I know my LED light works I'm going to repeat the same process on the other side now I'm just going to tape these wires out of the way future shot here another way to do this which adds additional strength is to pre-install your battery bay and electronics bay bottoms prior to laminating it by gluing them in and then laminating them all at the same time before we install laminate to this airframe I'm going to take and spray a layer of Super90 spray glue across the whole airframe top and bottom and let it dry for about 10 minutes and that will help the laminate stick to the foam better in the event of a crash when you do crash the laminate will tend to want to detach from the foam and leave that area vulnerable this Super90 will give the laminate something to do with here too look at my scissors you're so cute alright it's time to laminate the plane this laminate has two sides it has the sticky side and the glossy side the glossy side is what's going to go on the outside of the plane and the flat side is the sticky side that's going to adhere to the actual airframe itself there's just enough laminate to do this plane so you have to plan it out strategically you have to be a little bit creative about how you cut it I'm going to lay it across the wing here across the leading edge have a little bit left over hanging off the corner here and I've got about a half of an inch sticking over the front because I want to be able to roll it over onto the bottom side of the wing and then when I get to the center I'm going to go about a half inch over and cut upwards and then I'm going to mirror that for the other side alright now I've flipped it upside down and I'm going to repeat the process as a mirror image of the first one to do the other side so that's for the top let's do the same thing for the bottom let's try to lay these pieces on top of our remaining bits of laminate and try to see if we can create let's see if we can try to gain the maximum amount of leftover material as possible just by flipping these over and creating the same process over here since I did cut it in half all I have to do is lay it on top and cut this diagonal and I can do that two times and I'll have all this leftover to do our elevons on the final stages okay now I've got three out of four I'll save this we'll need it for later there's multiple ways to laminate a plane right wing recommends that you heat shrink these laminate pieces with a heat gun prior to placing them on the wing this laminating material is designed to shrink as you heat it if you're new to this and you're not used to using this laminate material you can taco your airplane and make it no longer straight so to prevent that from happening you can hang up these pieces of laminate and shrink them until they go completely clear prior to placing them on the airplane and heating them on and that will pre-shrink the film so that it doesn't taco your airplane in the interest of saving time I'm going to skip that step for this video just so we can get right on to the laminating process but just so you know that is a possibility that you can do if you're not comfortable laminating an airplane now that you've pre-shrunk your film you can go ahead and start laminating it to the wing future shot here when the panel's in ahead of time you'll have a little bit more left over laminate and it won't be as imperative that you save all the scraps remember that the flat side goes towards the foam and the clear side faces up set your heating I don't know what temperature this is but on this iron it's 4 out of 5 it's always a good idea to start in the middle and work your way outwards if you don't have a hobby iron you can use a standard close iron as well I just start in the middle and I work my way outwards from the center be careful not to get the iron too hot or you will melt the foam and you'll create warping in your airframe so I'm just going to go all the way out to where I'm about a half an inch from the edge on the back that's going to allow me to add the elevons later and tie it all together with the foam as I'm heating this material it's technically shrinking so I'm having to be very mindful that the wing is staying straight as I do this because I've got it pressed down on a flat table I can regulate my pressure and focus my energy to keeping this airplane straight as I'm doing this after you've got it to about a half an inch away from the edge bring it to the edge of the table and start rolling it around the front of the airframe we want to eventually get this all the way around to the back side and then when we do the other side it will overlap you'll start to see the leading edge form nice and straight double check to make sure that everything is straight and true because this is your last opportunity to make those changes before laminating the other side just give it a little bend if you need to to keep it straight and we can move on to coming around the other side so I usually stop about eighth of an inch from the edge of the laminate and we'll end up overlapping the next laminate on this side and that will end up bringing it all together now that we've done this side let's repeat the process on the other half of the wing now that we've done the top of the airframe let's go ahead and flip it over and do the bottom we're going to follow the same exact procedures except now we're overlapping some pre-existing laminate from the other side the procedure remains the same though let's go ahead and lay the film on top of the airframe with about a half of an inch sticking over the edge we haven't done anything in the back here yet so that's where our elevons are going to go and we're going to use this remaining material to attach the elevons after we've laminated those bring it past the edge here make sure that I'm overlapping in both areas and we'll start to laminate starting in the middle and working our way out just like before and just like before repeat the process on the other half of the wing just go around and make one final pass to make sure that all the air bubbles are out of the wing before moving on to the elevons we're going to trim around the battery bay and work the laminate into the cracks I'm going to use my snap razor blade for this and I'm going to trim in about one quarter inch on each square and make my way around about one quarter of an inch in from the outer edge after removing all the excess start from the corner on each corner and make a diagonal cut inwards as relief cuts so that you can start working the laminate into those corners and now with your iron you can wrap the laminate around inside the electronics bays creating that right angle on the edge of the foam another way to do this which adds additional strength is to pre-install your battery bay and electronics bay bottoms prior to laminating it by gluing them in and then laminating them all at the same time to demonstrate this I'm going to go ahead and install them now your battery bay bottom mount has a thin side and a thick side be sure to install the thin side forward once you place it there it's obvious which way it should go because the battery slots will show through the non-foam area let's put some glue down and my electronics bay tight fit I like it that way though it's good to be sure you have enough laminate to complete the job the pieces we're going to need for the elevons by laying them down and giving myself enough material to go all the way around both elevons and then with the leftover material we can do things like this flip it over cut the other side and then mirror that for the other elevon I'm going to mirror that on the other piece I'm going to set this aside with my elevons to laminate later now with the leftover material I'm going to laminate over the bottom of the battery bay and the electronics bay to add additional strength here we go I'm just going to trim off the excess because I might need it later if you remember to do this ahead of time you don't need to save these scraps after laminating the bottom plastic panels in place they're basically pretty permanent in there now we can go back and do the same steps to the top of the airframe and in this case you don't have to put the panels in ahead of time just like on the bottom I'm going to go ahead and cut one quarter of an inch in from the edges so that I can roll the material around the foam to make it a little bit stronger on the corners and then the corners go ahead and make your relief cuts use the iron everything rolls around nice and evenly and it doesn't fight you in the process just be patient with it sometimes it takes a minute for it to stick but once it sticks it's there is this glued on there baby it's glued in there after squaring those corners let's go ahead and take the top piece and do a test dry fit to make sure it's going to fit in the slot it should be tight on purpose so that it stays closed in flight later in the video we're going to place this door on a hinge so you can access your electronics and when it does close it needs to lock in place the battery door doesn't have a cover it just gets held in with a strap before we move on to the elevons let's go ahead and trim off the excess wing and we'll go ahead and finish off the edges with the iron and then when we go to glue on our winglets on the edge here we'll have a rough foam area for the glue to stick to saving all this extra you can already start to feel that this thing is rock solid it's a really strong wing once this laminate goes on after we've trimmed off the edges let's go around with the iron and just make sure that it is adhered to the edges and one more step before we do the elevons is to trim away the excess material on the motor mount area we're just going to trim around the foam in the back here we'll do the same thing we did on the sides where we make sure that the foam and the laminate around the edges is nice and adhered now on to the elevons before laminating these we need to do a little bit of shaping something to note about these elevons is there is a right angle and an acute angle on these elevons the top of the wing has a point to it we want to put the right angle part of the elevon up against the point of the top of the wing so the right angle of the elevon is going to go up if you're holding the airframe in it's upright position just like that with that in mind we're going to take our elevons and we're going to set it up against our airframe and we want to try to trim them at an angle that matches the airframe's angle we want to take a little bit extra off of this side over here so that when the elevon deflects it doesn't hit the winglet there are many different opinions on how you should cut your elevons some people like to cut them into a specific pattern because they believe that it gives the airframe a more axial role in this particular airframe I have found that it doesn't make a whole lot of difference so I'm just going to cut them in the easiest way possible to make this build simple for you and get you in the air quickly an alternative shape that you could cut in your elevon is something like this I'm going to trim away some of the inner section of the elevon so that more meat is out here and less meat is in here and this is supposed to give the airframe a more axial role but in my experience it didn't make any difference so we're just going to leave it like this I'm going to use the other elevon as a ruler and line it up to the back of the airframe give myself enough room to cut this matching edge we're going to take this and use it as a ruler and we're going to lightly score the balsa it doesn't take much effort to score this balsa once we have our mark made we'll go ahead and continue using the snap blade to finish off the cut so the right angle side goes here like we described before I'm going to push this in like I said before about a half of an inch so that when I do deflect this this point right here does not hit the winglet that's going to be sticking out in the back here as you deflect it it could hit the winglet if you don't move it in far enough so I'm going to move it in about a half of an inch and I'm going to trace this line onto the elevon with my handy dandy ruler and now that I have the line traced onto the elevon I'll finish it off with the razor blade this is what it should look like if done properly about a half of an inch from this edge and matching this line here now what you can do on the other elevon is create a mirror image by placing them on top of one another making sure to have the right angles facing each other and once you've done that you can trace those lines and finish off the cut on the second elevon now that we have our elevons cut and formed to the right shape we're going to go ahead and laminate them ahead of time before attaching them to the airplane to do this I'm going to start on the sharp edge and let the laminate hang over just a little bit be sure that the laminate is being ironed on the proper side you want to iron the clear glossy side and have the flat side attached to the elevon itself I have just a little bit of laminate sticking over the edge of the wood on the sharp pointy side of the wood on the sharper edge and I'm just going to start in the middle like before and work my way out now we're going to roll it over just like we did with the airframe and make sure that we have a nice sharp angle as we go around the elevon it's important that we keep this angle nice and sharp because this is going to be our hinge on the airplane so be sure to make sure that this is nice and sharp on this edge as you work it around the elevon use pressure on the iron as you're going over the edge to keep it tight and same thing on this side makes it a little bit easier if you pull tension on the material as you're laminating around the final edge here there we go now it's starting to look beautiful looks like a nice laminated piece of wood there and you can either trim off the excess or roll it around like we did with the airframe I'm just going to go ahead and roll it around just to demonstrate now we can trim off the excess on both sides and repeat the process on the other elevon we're saving all these scraps on purpose because in the future we might need them to cover over wire paths that we're going to create in the foam later when we run our servos and it's also good to keep this stuff in the future so that it matches to where the foam tears you can always repair it with a scrap piece of laminate the final step in the laminating process is to attach the elevons to the wings there's multiple ways of doing this and depending on your skill level one way may be better than another the way that I'm going to attach these elevons is to use the leftover material that we use to laminate the wing to create my hinge right wing feels that the right way to attach these elevons to the airframe is to use scotch tape and finish off your edges on the airframe and do a series of tape hinges such as this here how does he do it, he does it like this right wing feels that you should do a series of tape hinges such as this here and attach it to your elevon and use scotch tape as a hinge and if you are interested in that method you can check out some of their videos on how they do this procedure their argument on what makes this procedure beneficial is that it allows you to make a very straight edge on your elevon all the way down for me this method is not as durable of a solution and I plan on crashing this airplane many times so I want it to last a long time so I do it by first starting out on the top here and laminating this top edge and then I will flip over the elevon and take the remaining piece to get the rear edge of the elevon while wrapping it all the way around and attaching it to the laminate that we put on the elevon the top of your airframe has a sharp point and we want to make sure that that point matches up to the right angle of our elevon as I described before and once you've done that the edge here so that this line matches up giving yourself a half inch gap over here and all the way down we're going to tack this hinge right here to where the foam meets the wood and we're going to make sure that it is tacked in multiple places down the wing here in order to keep it straight as we're attaching this laminate to the airframe be sure that the gap does not get any larger as you go down the edge of the wing make sure that this gap stays nice and tight so that your hinge is nice and sharp and then work your way down after tacking it in a couple of places and be sure that it stays flush against the top edge of the wing use your hand to press up on the wood if necessary just to keep the two edges tight against each other if done properly it should be nice and straight all the way down the wing and you'll have a nice straight hinge and your wing won't have been warped go ahead and work out all the wrinkles on the wood here we're going to trim off the excess here trim off this excess here now we're going to flip over the elevan and repeat the process with the bottom half of the wing's laminate being sure that this edge here is nice and tight up against the foam edge use the iron to go around the edge of the bottom of the wing starting in the middle working my way out just like before and I'm going to tack it in multiple places just so that it stays nice and straight after I've tacked it in multiple places I'm going to work my way from the center outward I can flip it back and forth just to verify that everything is still nice and straight on the top side and we're going to finish off our laminate by rolling it around and finishing off the bond of the laminate finally let's trim off the remainder of this laminate getting rid of all the excess on the edge here there we go now that the excess is removed you can see that our elevan is kind of stuck in an upward position here and that's not desirable because our servo is going to have to work really hard to straighten it out on the edge of the table I'm going to use the iron's heat to force the elevan back into a proper position after it worked as hard to deflect it go ahead and repeat the process on the other side and then we'll move on to electronics the final step in the assembly of the airframe is to install the hinge in your electronics bay in order to allow for our electronics bay hatch to have ventilation we're going to go ahead and cut along this edge right here to create a hinge we're just going to give a relief cut on the bottom side of this hatch flap right here so that I can flip it open just like that to allow airflow to come into our electronics bay I'm going to take one of our scrap pieces of spar material here and we're going to create a hinge on this electronics bay hatch we're going to slide this scrap piece of spar material through our slot and our corrugated plastic and we're going to use that to create a hinge in the front of the electronics bay lining up the back of the hatch here with the back of the electronics bay we'll go ahead and line up the razor blade with our spar and make a slot for the rod to slide into we'll cut off the excess with our trusty wire cutters here and notch it down into the foam and then we're going to take some scrap lamin material and cover over these slots to keep those hinges in place and then when we're finished we'll be able to open and close our electronics bay hatch now you have a working hatch bay door time to move on to electronics the first thing I want to start with is the servos and before we insert the servos into the airplane it's always a good idea to center the servos when you center a servo you position the arm on the servo into the center position I've got a servo centering tool here there's a variety of different types of servo centering tools you can use for this or if you don't have a servo centering tool you can't wait until this process is completed and your receiver is wired up to your servo and you can use your radio to center the servos later if this doesn't work for you if you don't have a servo centering tool you can just do this step later but we're going to go ahead into this step right now I'm using the Emacs ES08MA which is a metal analog gear servo the metal gears are going to make the servo stronger than plastic gear servos but any 9 gram servo will do for this airplane in the packaging that comes with your servo one black Phillips head screw and one servo arm to center the servo we're going to plug in the servos to the servo centering tool and we're going to power it up with a lipo battery set it to the center position and we're going to make sure that our servos are set right beside each other in the same orientation and we're going to point one arm one direction at a 90 degree angle and one arm in the opposite direction in the 90 degree angle from the servo now that we have them placed take your Phillips head screw driver available at roadride.com and tighten these screws down now your servos are successfully centered because of the way the servos mount in this airplane with the servo horns facing up you can always do this later I just like to do it in this order I'm going to set the servo centering tool aside and we're going to now mount the servos in the airplane we're going to use our trusty roader riot hobby knife available at roaderride.com and we're going to trace the square there's a servo shaped hole on both sides of the airplane we're just going to trace that with our hobby knife and cut away the laminate we'll do that on both sides and then we're going to dig out the foam in that area it should be laser cut all the way through so all you should have to do is dig out the foam and we'll have a placed amount on our servo now that we've dug out the hole for our servos we're going to go ahead and place the servos in the hole and test fit them I like to place them with the servo horn this is to the back of the wing and I like to point my wire lead forward just like that because now we're going to cut a channel for our wire to reach into our electronics bay and now when I place my servo into the hole I will route the wire along that channel that I cut out and I'll leave myself a little bit of extra slack in case I ever need to remove the servo later and press it down inside repeat the same process on the other side now's a good time to go ahead and glue the servos in so you don't forget to do it later I've done that several times and have the plane not fly so well put a generous amount around the edges here and press the servo in place wiggle around a little bit to spread that glue now our servos are mounted in the airframe and our wires are ran into the electronics bay we can cover over the holes that we just created with some more laminate alright now my servo wires are in the electronics bay we'll go ahead and close that up for now the next step is to install the control horns in our kit we've given you extra control rods and extra control horns and extra screws just in case you make a mistake and each one of these control rods is threaded on both ends we're only going to use one of those threaded ends we're going to cut the rod to length and make a Z bend on the other side the first step will be to thread your control linkage onto your control arm I'd like to put it halfway between the threads so that I can go backwards or forwards as needed to make changes and adjustments to the elevons since these control linkages fit perfectly into the control horns we're going to use the control linkage in the rear of the airplane and we're going to make our Z bend up front at the servo so we're going to do a test fit to make the Z bend we'll need a pair of Nino nose pliers or a Z bend tool after you've lined up your control rod with your servo horn in the hole that you choose to use using the farthest end hole closest to the servo gives you maximum torque using the farthest hole out gives you maximum deflection there are different holes on your servo horn the hole all the way out at the end because I like extreme crazy throws and I like to spiral this thing but for beginners it would be better to go to the farthest end hole or one hole out from the center to give less deflection and a smoother ride starting with the center hole versus going all the way out like me and at the back I'm going to place the control horn at the second hole from the top the airplanes need more torque than others to create the role depending on how fast your airplane is and how much stress you're putting on your servo and your linkage the other problem with torque is that your control rod could bend with all of the stress of the speed of the airplane and I've noticed when I have full deflection and full rates and maximum rotation that this rod will bend optionally you can strengthen this rod with a carbon fiber tube if you're just going to fly it regular you probably don't need that but if you want to maximize the speed of the rotation of the turns then you definitely want to strengthen up that control rod with a carbon fiber spar or a barbeque skewer or something that can strengthen the stiffness and keep the rod from bending I'm using a 1 eighth inch carbon fiber rod in order to thicken up this control rod I'm just going to cut it about the right length and join it with a piece of heat shrink before permanently mounting it to the airplane again this step is optional it's not necessary I just want to show you how to do this to fly with maximum rates and power this heat shrink will lock the carbon fiber tube to the control rod now that I've reinforced my control rod and I know which holes I'm going to be using I'm going to line up the control horn so that the holes of the control horn line up to the hinge line the holes need to be vertically lined up with the hinge line of the elevon and that way when your servo deflects forward and backwards the elevons will move up and down exactly the same in both directions and that way left and right are going to match when you do a roll it should be more axial as long as you get this correct once you have it lined up take a sharp tool and mark where the two holes are going to go but we're just going to poke a hole into the wood in both positions so that we know where to drill our holes now that I've marked my holes with the pick tool I'm going to take my drill bit which is about the same size as this hole here in the plastic and I'm going to drill through my elevons be sure to do this straight up and down next remove the bottom section of the control horn from the top section of the control horn we're going to thread our M2 screws through the control horn down through the elevon and into the bottom of the wing in this orientation here just like that with a 1.5 millimeter hex driver we'll tighten these screws into our plastic bottom just screw it in tight enough to where it's biting down on the wood just a little bit and your elevon should go up and down with no problem as long as you heated the hinge like we did earlier it doesn't need a ton of deflection because this airplane is extremely fast and these elevons are really large for the size of the plane itself now that we have that lined up we're going to try to create an almost parallel surface with our elevon but we need a tiny bit of reflex you have about a quarter of an inch between the hinge line and the tool and that's about how much reflex you want to start with with this measurement in mind we're going to try to keep this reflex as we bend our Z-Bend to line up to our holes of our servo what I like to do is to put the tool right along the back edge of the servo just like this when I make my Z-Bend and then the natural curve of the bend of the wire will line up with the hole in the servo arm and then we'll use the thickness of the needle nose pliers to bend it up perpendicular in the other direction when you're finished you should have a Z-Bend that looks like this and it should line up to the hole of your servo next we need to take a drill bit just like we did before about the same size as we needed back here we're going to go ahead and drill out the second hole from the center of the servo we're going to cut off the excess material of our control rod the Z-Bend cut off we're going to go ahead and take our screw out of our servo take the control horn off and thread the control rod through the servo arm just like this and push it back on top of the servo be careful not to rotate the arm on the servo so that you can continue to keep it centered can always change it later if you mess up but it's just nice not to have to do that now if you've done everything properly with the servo centered you should have about a quarter of an inch deflection upwards with your elevon now repeat this process on the other side so if you don't have quite a quarter of an inch back here or if your two elevons don't match you can rotate your clevis to make it line up where you need it to now that we've got both sides done confirm that both elevons are deflected about the same height now it's time to move on to the rest of the electronics before we move into our electronics bay we're going to route these electronics bay and get them out of the way of the battery bay I'm going to take a scrap piece of my control rod and I'm going to do a slight bend in that control rod now while holding with the needle nose pliers I'm going to use my torch to make this rod red hot now I'm going to poke right through from the battery bay into the electronics bay and I'm going to wallow it around to create a large enough hole to get my XT60 wire through and my LED wires through on both sides and process on the other side of the battery bay as well route our LED wires through from front to back if you want to make it nice and clean you can use your Xacto knife to create a channel just like before in the side of the battery bay for the wires to ride within and just kind of push them and tuck them into that slot next we're going to work on mounting the motor in the rear of the frame before we mount our motor it's a good idea to go ahead and run our wires through the airframe that we did with the LED wires in the front but in the rear of the airplane here so we're going to break out our torch again and we're going to make room for these wires to go from the motor mounting area into the electronics bay now that my wires have been passed through I can go ahead and mount my motor hopefully Justin doesn't see that I'm using his wire cutters to do this but we're going to take away some of the excess metal off the back of this motor mount before we mount the motor I should have done this before I put it on the airplane alright now that I've got a I'm just going to bend it back and forth and get it off of there the rest of the way there we go now we've got our excess metal off the back of the airframe to mount your motor you want to mount it in this orientation with the pigtail sticking up towards the widest part of the motor mount and this will give you the maximum adjustability forward and backwards on your wing mount just in case you want to move the CG slightly forward or backwards I'm going to go ahead and line it up like this and mount my motor to the back of the motor mount just like this when you put it in the kit you'll have 4 6mm M3 screws my motors also come with M3 by 8mm screws in case your motor tolerances are different depending on what motor you choose to use be mindful when screwing in these screws that the screw does not hit the winding on the motor loosely thread in all four screws at first then once you have all four screws in place go ahead and tighten them down I normally use lock tight when inserting motor screws but on a wing there's usually a lot less vibration there is in a drone and you shouldn't be crashing it as often so I have yet to have a motor screw loosen up on a wing now line it up to your airframe into the holes that you choose to use for your application we're going to use the screws that came with our motor mount kit and the lock nuts as well to mount the motor mount to the airframe as I'm tightening these bolts down I'm paying close attention that the prop line of my motor is perpendicular to my airframe it can also be really helpful to have a prop attached during this process to make sure that your motor is perpendicular to the airframe the angle of the motor as I'm positioning it and as I'm cranking it down to make sure that this prop is perpendicular to the airframe's direction of travel if it's cocked one way or the other it will create some adverse yaw into your airframe now that our motor is mounted to our motor mount and our motor mount is mounted to our airframe we'll go ahead and remove the prop for now just so that it lays flat on the table for the remaining steps the HQ J37 prop works really well in this airplane I'm going to go ahead and pull my MR30 connector tight against the airframe just to keep it out of the propeller now it's time to solder up the remainder of our electronics now would be a good time to slide the heat shrink over your ESC to make it slide a little bit easier through our ESC I'm going to go ahead and stretch it just a little bit with the needle nose pliers now that we've got our heat shrink passed over our ESC we can go ahead and solder on our motor wires to the motor pads to prevent me from damaging my airframe while soldering I'm going to place the plastic container that came with my Xacto knife over top of the airframe so that I don't end up dropping solder balls on the airframe and putting a hole in my foam we're going to go ahead and tin the pads on the ESC the motor pads on the ESC are a little bit thicker so I'm going to set the temperature up to about 400 degrees on the soldering iron and we're going to tin the leads of our motor as well before we mount them to the ESC pad the order that you solder these wires on doesn't matter as long as you get all three solder joints done nicely we use our tweezers here if you wish to change the direction that your motor is spinning for the particular prop that you're going to install you can simply switch any two of these pads and that will reverse the motor direction for me I'm just going to choose the prop direction that matches the motor when I'm finished I'm going to slide my heat shrink over the ESC next I'm going to feed my power leads for the XT60 through the airframe into the battery bay and I'm going to go ahead and solder on my XT60 lead pro tip on these XT60s, if you grab it with your pliers and rotate the leads you can have the cup facing upward and it will make it a little bit easier to pull the solder inside your XT60 I'm going to go ahead and tin the leads coming off the ESC use a little bit of heat shrink locker down, good way to remember which side is which round is ground and the square side is positive I'm going to hold it with my needle nose pliers because it's getting kind of hot line up my ground with the round side now the positive lead on the square side of the XT60 alright, there we go, now our XT60 is soldered on, go ahead and pull my heat shrink over the leads and shrink her down if you're going to fly FPV with this plane it's a good idea to go ahead and feed your JST connector into the battery bay as well at this stage we're going to go ahead and wire up our LED lights and combine the reds and the blacks and solder them up and heat shrink them down now that our LED wires are wired and our battery leads are through into the battery bay, we can plug our servos into the remaining ports on our receiver our ESC is wired into channel 1 our left servo is going to be wired into channel 2 our right servo will be wired into channel 3 and our battery input 5V will be wired into channel 4 be careful to know which orientation you put these connectors in the grounds should be in the center if you're using the ER4 by RadioMaster like I am here, be sure to check your servos pinouts to verify that your signal positive and negative are in the right orientation before we start taping our electronics down I'm going to go ahead and put a piece of heat shrink on the BEC as well another pro tip after heat shrinking your electronics if you take a pair of needle nose pliers on both ends you'll further waterproof your electronics while it's hot you can get it to lock down tight over the wires and on the other end and that is now waterproofed on both ends now with a piece of double sided tape on each of these three items I'm going to go ahead and place them in the electronics bay and lock them down then I'll run my receiver lead out the side and point it as close to up as I can go ahead and reinforce that area just like before with a piece of laminate the final step in building the airframe before we program the radio is to install the winglets on the ends of the airframe the winglets go on with the louvers facing up just like this and the front of the winglets should touch the front edge of the airframe just like that try to line up the tail edge of the airframe with this notch here I'm going to go back to using my trusty welder glue for this step I'm going to apply a generous amount to the edge of the airframe the small part of the wingtip goes on the bottom of the airframe and the top part of the wingtip goes on the top of the airframe so with that in mind I'm going to try to line up my two ends and press the glue in place wiggle it around just a little bit pull them apart and spread the glue with my finger here now repeat the same process on the other side and set a timer for 15 minutes then we'll come back and press these in place I'm waiting for my wingtips to dry I'm going to go ahead and test out my airframe with a battery now will be a good time to go ahead and get a smoke stopper if you have one before plugging this in just to verify that everything is okay and no fires happen but I don't have one sitting here so I'm just going to go ahead and plug it in fingers crossed and since there's no receiver we're not getting the final tones but everything lights up everything seems to be working I have power on my BEC I have power on my receiver and I have power to my ESC so everything is wired properly everything I do while I'm waiting for my glue to dry is I'm going to go ahead and install my trusty rotor riot battery strap go ahead and slice these two slots where the battery strap goes through the battery mount in the battery bay go ahead and put the battery strap in there with the rubbery side facing inward towards the center pull my power lead across there this is how I strap my battery in place I pull the power lead across the top of the battery and lock it down with the battery strap that way when I go to plug in the airframe right here everything is locked in place when mounting your propeller on the airframe it's important to position it with the numbers of the propeller facing forward the propeller should always face in the direction of forward flight be sure to check the direction that your motor is spinning in order to choose the proper prop for this procedure just like a drone it should spin in the direction of the leading edge of the prop facing forward now that our 15 minutes are up we'll go ahead and mount our winglets on the side of the airframe since this is the side I did first I'll start with this side I'm going to make sure I carefully line it up with the front and the back edge of the airframe making sure to line up this notch with this pointy part of the wing and once I get it nice and lined up I'm going to press it on nice and tight hold it for 10 seconds rock solid now repeat the process on the other side now we're going to move on to the FPV portion of this build I'm going to show you how to insert your FPV camera into the nose of the plane to make it a little bit easier on myself I'm going to unscrew the prop and remove it from the motor included in your FPV kit will be an antenna mount a camera mount a template for cutting out the nose piece and four M2 by 20mm screws at the time of the recording of this video that gives you the option out of the box to have voltage on your on-screen display without having to do any crazy modifications or having an external flight controller it will work with DGI it will work with analog and it will work with pretty much any video system I've made this a universal mount so that it can fit a variety of different video systems but we're going to go ahead and show you how to do it with the Waxnail kit today because it's the only one that shows voltage on screen before we start cutting into the wing Waxnail FPV system installed into our FPV pod and the package that comes with your Waxnail video transmitter and camera kit is a power cable and we're going to need that power cable so let's pull it out of the package and we're going to solder it up to our male JST connector we're only going to need the red and black wires I'm going to cut the gray and white wires but leave them long just in case I decide to add a flight controller to this later I'm just going to go ahead and snip off these 10 to ends and strip these wires cut off an appropriate size piece of heat shrink and don't forget to put the heat shrink on before you solder it twist our positive and negatives together one at a time now with your soldering iron set to about 300 degrees celsius we'll just solder these two wires and heat shrink them down we're just going to twist these wires to clean them up a little bit we'll put a little piece of electrical tape around it in case you decide to use them again in the future and that's our power cable for our video transmitter camera setup the walk snail camera system comes with a variety of screw sizes we're probably not going to be using any of these but in case you need to make spacing adjustments or anything like that you have washers and nuts in this packaging right here the first step is to take the rotor right 1.5mm hex tool and unscrew the four mounting screws and nuts on the walk snail system we'll start with the two on the front where the camera cord is going in be sure not to lose these metal plates that hold the camera cord in place we're going to have those installed into the pod along with the screws and the plastic that we're going to be mounting to it next we're going to take our four m2 by 20mm screws and we're going to start threading them through the top of the antenna adapter here it's a little tight so you can use your 1.5mm hex driver to thread it through you have one of these fancy dancy drills you can do it a lot faster mounting posts on the bottom of the walk snail video transmitter should slot right into these four holes here and once you've lined those up then you should be able to pass these four screws through the walk snail system making sure not to lose these metal plates and if you need to you can take some of the washers out of the hardware pack that comes with the walk snail system to space everything out since I didn't pull these screws out before I'm going to do that now be sure not to lose the nuts that you're taking out because we're going to reuse those in a minute here when we lock this down we're going to go ahead and install our antenna into the antenna mount before you press it in go ahead and lock it in place on the video transmitter so we can get the approximate angle that this needs to be once we rotate it around so this is going to be on the bottom we're going to rotate this around like this and the antenna will come out the back just like that so we want the antenna to be oriented like this so we're going to twist it until it's not bound up in place now that it's locked in place we can go ahead and reinstall our top plate and I'm going to go ahead and place a couple of washers in there just to space it up a little bit to lock down the camera cable plate now with those washers in place it will help to press down on the plate when we cinch these tight when you crank these down you'll see that the TPU is very flexible and it's going to press down on that metal plate once we crank it down tight we'll go ahead and put our antenna hold down plate back in place before you place this camera set up in the mount let's go ahead and put our power cable into the port right here now we can pass the cable through our camera mount and out the back because this is going to go towards the airplane for me I like to have the camera cable come out the back like this I'm going to ride it across this channel here and pass it through the slot right here so that the camera will go into its position make sure that you mount this with the words facing up and the goggles if you have it upside down by accident now that we have tucked away majority of our cable inside of the mount we can pass our screws through the rest of the mount making sure that all of our cables are routed through the channel and don't get pinched in between the TPU and the video transmitter so now we're just going to pass our screws through the holes now all four of the screws have been passed through the mount we can go ahead and put our nuts on the backside and tighten them down these are the nuts that came originally attached with your WalkSnail video transmitter now that I've got all four of them started I'm going to go ahead and crank them all down everything is nice and loose nothing is pinched in the TPU or the video transmitter next we're going to mount the camera into the camera mount and these mounting holes are universal so that you can slide the camera forward or backwards depending on the camera system you're using so that this TPU does not show up in view but it does a great job of protecting the camera so I'm going to push it back about there I'm going to go ahead and insert my four screws into the camera boom at this point what you might want to do is plug in the power to your camera go into your goggles and adjust the distance forward and backwards of your camera because the screws may or may not be accessible once we've glued it into the airplane and next we're going to glue this into the airplane to mount the FPV pod into the airplane we're going to need a few things we're going to need a torch to heat up the metal rod just like before when we inserted our motor wires we're going to need our rotor red X-Acto knife some welder glue and our template I designed this template to allow you to easily slip it over the front of the wing and know exactly where you're going to make your cut lines with the X-Acto knife this will keep it nice and straight and even take your rotor red X-Acto knife and start at the point right here and work your way down on both sides and then we're going to come make a straight line from this point to this point afterwards press our X-Acto knife into the laminate and with a sawing motion just go all the way towards the front of the wing now we're going to make a straight line from here to here just like that and we're going to flip it over and repeat the same thing on the bottom side of the airplane this template does a good job of keeping your top and bottom lines even with each other and again we're going to make a straight line from one side to the other now that I have the cut lines embedded into the laminate I'm going to go ahead and finish those cuts through the foam and you should be able to cut the section from the airplane if you cut through successfully there you go now you have a place to insert your FPV pod we're just going to do a quick dry test fit with the wires out of the way once we're finished it should look just like that now we're going to make a channel for our wires to go through to do that we're going to take our torch and our wire from earlier and make a hole through the foam just like we did previously you can also do this with a sawing iron as well if you don't have a torch press it right through the center go right into the battery compartment wiggle it around a little bit make a big round hole now we should be able to take our power cable and press it right into the battery bay where we can attach it to our other connector just like that and now if you need to disconnect your video transmitter you have an easy way to connect and disconnect your video transmitter final step is to take our FPV pod and glue it into place this usually takes about 15 to 20 minutes before it's cured to a point where you can leave it alone so I recommend finding something to hold it in place so that it stays straight if you need to you can also take some hot glue to help hold it in place in the meantime while the welder glue is drying let's let that dry for about 20 minutes and then we'll come back and finish the rest of it after we've finished installing our FPV gear it's time to adjust the center of gravity the CG on an airplane is way more important than it is on a drone it's the most important factor in the airplane an old saying they always say is a nose heavy plane will fly badly a tail heavy plane will fly once it's usually best to make the plane a little bit more nose heavy than tail heavy and that will just give you a little bit more control when you're learning how to fly the proper CG on this plane is anywhere between 6 and a quarter inches and 7 and a quarter inches from front to back when calculating the CG imagine that you do not have the FPV camera on the front and the point of the nose of the airplane is still intact 7 and a quarter equates to this rear spar back here and 6 and a quarter equates to the back of the holes I like to put it right in the middle which is a couple of millimeters back from the back of the servo mounting holes and once you find the proper CG it's always a good idea to poke a hole in the airplane so that at the field when you're testing for a CG you can place your fingers on those holes and check for proper CG at the field because there's no battery in here it's going to be incorrect with the CG marked on the bottom of your airplane go ahead and place your propeller and your battery in your airplane and let's check the CG to see how accurate it is it's a little bit nose heavy so this would be pretty good for a beginner if you're more advanced pilot you can pull the motor farther back a little bit more and put your CG a little bit farther back in the airplane if you'd like or if you want your CG to be even more nose heavy you could add a bigger heavier battery or even some nose weight if necessary now we have the CG all set up and correct we're going to go ahead and show you how to bind your receiver to your radio there are a lot of different protocols that you could be using for this airplane such as crossfire spectrum or FR sky for example and in this particular video we used ELRS and I'm going to show you how to quickly set up a model on a OpenTX or an EdgeTX radio in order to do that press and hold the model button find an unused model location such as this press in on the scroll wheel create model and press in on the scroll one more time now that we have a model created we're going to press the page button to move over to the next page and we'll go ahead and give it a name by pressing in on the scroll wheel and rotate the scroll wheel until we have the name of our choice and hit the return key to exit now that I've got model name selected I need to scroll backwards with my scroll wheel and make sure that my external RF is turned on and set to crossfire protocol because I'm using an external ELRS transmitter on this radio crossfire now hit the return key to exit next I'm going to page over to the input section since we're not going to be using a rudder on this plane we can hold in on the scroll wheel and then press delete we can remove the unnecessary rudder another thing that you want to do on this plane is you want to reduce the rates if you were to fly this plane at 100% rates you would have a very big loss in control we're going to go into our aileron and elevator settings and we're going to reduce the rates from 100% down to 45% we're going to do that by pressing in on the scroll wheel and pressing edit we're going to go down to the weight and we're going to reduce that down to about 45% if you're like me and you want ridiculous roll weights you can set this to about 60% with the aileron and elevator set to 45% we can move on to the next step now that our inputs are set up properly we can move over to the next page by paging over to the mixes section or by pressing in on the scroll wheel and hitting delete because we're not going to be using channel 4 we're only using 3 of the 4 channels of this receiver now we need to set up our aileron and our elevator by creating mixes on channel 2 and channel 3 so on channel 2 we're going to press in on the scroll wheel scroll over to channel 2 press in on the scroll wheel and press edit for this next step it depends on which direction your servos are traveling and which servo brand you chose a lot of variable can happen here and you might need to reverse the numbers so if it doesn't work for you and everything is backwards you can make all of these values the negative of what I'm getting ready to put in but this should give you an idea on how to set up your servos to get them traveling in the right direction to start we're going to set the channel 2 weight to 50 make sure that your source is set to aileron alright we're going to return using the return key and we're going to now create a second channel 2 by pressing in on the scroll wheel and pressing insert after we're going to set the weight of this one to negative 50 on the second value for channel 2 we're going to set this to elevator and this will use the elevator input for this channel we'll go ahead and return from that then we'll press the return key to exit the menu and move down to channel 3 now on channel 3 we're going to press in on the scroll wheel and repeat a similar process go down and change the weight to 50 and return and then for channel 3 we're going to do the same thing except we're going to use a positive 50 for elevator and aileron so the first one we're going to set to elevator we're going to set the weight to 50 and we're going to do the same thing we did on channel 2 by pressing in on the scroll wheel and pressing insert after and we're going to set this to aileron and set the weight to 50 when done your mixes page should look like this after your model has been set up in your radio it's now time to bind the receiver to the radio to do that with an aileron receiver is very easy just using the battery without having to have any special software on your computer we can do that using the 3 plug method let's go ahead and open up our electronics base so that we can see our receiver and we're going to plug the battery in 3 times leaving it plugged in on the third plug in we'll do this quickly and if we do it properly we should see a 2 flash LED flash pattern on the ER4 receiver now that I've plugged it in 3 times quickly you can see that the LED on the ER4 is flashing a double flash pattern that means it's ready for binding now in your radio in order to bind the receiver we need to hold down on the sys key we need to navigate to express lrs lewis script press in on the dial scroll down to bind and press in on the bind button and it should automatically bind to your receiver if successful you'll hear your ESC beep the proper tones indicating that it sees the receiver and your receiver should have a solid LED light indicating that it is bound to the radio next with the propeller elevated and away from danger we'll go ahead and test our control inputs I'm going to use the aileron stick first to make sure that left and right correlates to the direction the elevons should be turning if done properly pressing left on your aileron stick should raise your left elevon and pressing right on the aileron stick should raise your right elevon pulling back on the stick should raise both elevons and pressing forward on the stick should lower both elevons finally we need to check to make sure that the motor is spinning the correct direction and to do that we're going to remove our prop and we're going to see if our ESC is properly configured or not properly configured the way to calibrate your ESC on an airplane is a little bit different than on a drone with airplanes ESCs need to be calibrated unlike drones where you can just go into beta flight and set it to D shot and everything is great with an airplane you need to calibrate your ESCs to make sure that it knows where the bottom end point and top end point of your throttle stick are so to do that we're going to unplug our airplane one more time we're going to place our throttle stick on the airplane wait for all those tones to happen and then bring your throttle stick down and if you hear all of those tones then you have properly calibrated your ESC now we should be able to use our throttle stick to activate our motor and make it spin and if we just give it a little bit of throttle we can figure out which direction the motor is spinning and choose the appropriate prop to fit that motor direction when you're putting your prop on your airplane be sure that the numbers or letters you want to make sure that your prop is spinning in the right direction so that it is facing in the direction of travel once you've unplugged your battery and cranked down your prop nut, it's time to go fly thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed this video be sure to like and subscribe so you can see more content like this I'm Les Flair C and we'll see you next time on Rotor Riot