[secant0give]

Thats a nice plane Jason

Thanks Frank !!


I test flew it today and was very please with how it went. There were a few minor issues that need to be sorted out. So I only had one flight even tho' I had 3 sets of batteries for it ready to go.

Firstly the prop I'm running on it is a 17X10 I think it would do better with an 18X8 APC or a 19X6 wooden prop. I've used both the latter with the other Yak. This was the first time I've tried the 17X10 and I found it a bit lacking in acceleration. It still had more than enough power to fly indefinatly verticle but it just didn't jump like the other yak does running the finer pitch props.

The light tail wheel I used on it wasn't quite able to cut the mustard it ended up being bent out of shape even after quite a nice gentle landing. All That it needs is to get a decent peice of piano wire to replace the soft hobbyking wire strut. It should be fine then.

The elevators are slightly out of line which was my mistake I didn't notice that, on one of them of them the balancer is quite bent and I ligned up the leading edges of the elevator balancers and the leading edge of the tail plane. All looks good untill you look at the trailing edges of the elevators and see that one is about 8mm lower than the other. It didn't make much difference to the way it flew tho' I adjusted the aileron trim to compensate and it flew thumbs off straight as a die. This won't be a problem to fix so I will do that before the next flight as well.

landing it was no problem, the C of G is perfict just where they suggest it to be in the instructions I wouldn't change it at all.

My rudder throw was a bit on the excessive side I didn't need anything like full rudder to hold it in knife edge so I will probably back it off a fair bit more on low rates.

I took it up to a good height and put it inot a pretty tight flat spin and then let the sticks go to see what would happen, not much infact, continuing to spin it did another turn and a half untill I gave it some opposite rudder and opened up the power a bit. Then it flew straight out no probs at all.

How does it fly?? The answer is just as to ask it too. All in all it's a very nice plane, easy to land and with no nasty suprises. Heaps of power, not overly fast but fast enough not to be bounced around by a reasonable breeze.
Basically it's an easy and enjoyable one to fly once you get used to the size of it. I would recomend this kit as being a good one. The quality of manufacture is good and much the same as the super and cheaper Yak of the same size. The HK Yak is probably slightly better designed structually but with the suggested hardware you would need to add a lot of ballest to get the C of G right which is not so good. This can be over come but it took a bit of stooging around so I'm leaning toward saying that the super and cheaper Yak is the better by the smallest of margins. It's probably a little cheeper as well. This plane does have the advantage of removable tailplanes and with the super and cheaper Yak they are fixed.

It flies a lot like the other Yak 55M as you would expect, they are very close to the same dimentions. This one weighs about 150-200 grams more. I will weigh it up propperly when I've done those few little mods but I reckon it's about 5.2Kg It balances with no extra weight added and 2 X 3000 6S lipo packs as far forward as they can go and a G 160 motor in the nose. There are lighter motors that could pull this plane around but you need the weight up there to make it balance so I'd opted to go for a decent size motor rather than adding balast.

Oh and it too seems to make strange noises in the air, just like the other Yak ???