Time to cover and paint the toys.

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine gave me a big bunch of balsa wood, metal parts and a box with about twenty rolls of covering material, monokote, ultrakote, etc. On the model I built second I figured to make it yellow and blue and red. There wasn't any white in the box and my stash only had a half roll. Not enough to do the model. I did have monokote and ultrakote in the same color of yellow so I figured to go with it. I must say that the ultrakote went on very well. It felt a little thicker than monokote though. I made hinges with it and assembeled the flaps and elevator. After sticking down all four wing panels, top, bottom, left and right, I got out the heat gun to shrink the covering tight. After several tries to get one panel tight I realized it wasn't going to get any tighter.Wrinkles, sags, and bags everywhere. Not acceptable. I agonized over what to do but it was clear the ultrakote had to come off. I carefully removed the covering and applied yellow monokote to the wing and stab. This time it shrunk up nice. I've been using Top Flite Monokote ever since it came out in the early 60's. It still works. I put some blue and red trim kote on the wings and stab. Then I took a good look at the fin and rudder. I just didn't look right. I sawed the fin off and made a new one of angular shape rather than round. It looks much better now. I'm up to painting the fuselage now. I was reading the forum site and one guy showed how he made a control horn from aluminum angle. He did it because his plastic horn was too flexible. The plastic horn on my modified twister is flexible. I didn't have any angle so I bent a piece of alum. 90 degrees and drilled holes and bolted it to the flaps. I got in a test flight tonight of this afternoon and what a diferance. The loops are the right size not ground to seventy degrees up. The limit is 5 feet to 45 degrees up. That was the only plane with a plastic control horn on the flaps. All the rest have metal.
Perry Rose