[Drew]

I've sold out to the dark side!!!

I ordered an EPO MX2 from Hobby King at Midnight on Wednesday and it was on my doorstep Friday morning. After dropping my son at cubs, I started assembly at 8:30pm and it was ready for fly by midnight.

The look of the plane is good. It definately has the 20M appeal. A 1.4M wingspan and generous sized fuse makes it look like a solid model. A flying weight of around 2Kg reingofrces that.

There appers to be more than enough thrust on the 36-48 motor, 70A speedy and 4S pack. The plane jumps into the air on half throttle and Jason provided evidence that it hovers and can pull out of a hover quite adequately (more on that later).

Assembly was straightforward except for the tail wheel. The instructions were complete but useless due to the thumbnail sized images and terse descriotins. All hardware is inlcuded and everything fits well and easily.
The XT60 plug which is pre-attached to the ESC leads appears to be incorrectly machined and the pins do not correctly mate with the socket. It appears that they have not been cut correctly to compress into the socket. We bypassed this on the maiden by forcing the pulgs together and using sticky tape to make sure they stayed that way.

The first flight allowed simple trim with only a a couple of clicks here and there. It liked a bit of speed and the COG was possibly off a little. The 4S pack is stuffed into a cavity forward of the wing spar and was wedged in with some spare foam. Unfortunately, shortly after trimming, the canopy flew off. After I had a couple of false landing attpempts, I handed the controls to Jason who offered to bring it in for me.

On the last turn, the battery came loose (the canopy was no longer there to assist with holding it in) and dangled overthe trailing edge of the wing. Very fortuantely, the sticky tape probably prevented the battery coming loose!! However, this dramatically forced the plane into a tail heavy situation (the battery was now a good 30-40cm behind it's balanced poisition) and immediately triggered quite an impressive hover maneuver by Jason. He was able to pull out and complete another circuit before skillfully bringing it in for a gentle landing.

Thanks to Gary's keen eyes, the canopy was quickly and easily retrieved from the edge of the reeds.

A rubber band rectified the weakness of the canopy retrntion magnet and some velcro was added to ensure the battery stayed where it was put.


Later, a second flight was attempted. Again take-off was spritely and the plane looked and felt quite stable in the air. However, about 2 minutes in, it felt as if the motor stopped. Reducing power and re-applying returned thrust. I sought to bring it down by gliding it to approach height and using power to correct my lack of gliding skills. With reasonable air speed, this plane glides in quite nicely.

For landing, it does need to be flown in and an error at the threshold of the runway cause it to balloon and I then had a bit of a panic as it got to the end of the runway which ended with a hard landing on the RH wheel and nose. The only damage was the wheel pants and a slight twist on the RH under carraige support.

For $175 on the doorstep - this looks like it will be quite a performer. Now the pilot just needs to work out how to fly but specifically - land it .

Hopefully - John Hale has some video of the flight. I'll try to extract and post some photos.