Post by sean on Jun 25, 2008 14:35:20 GMT 10
A few weeks back I snapped up a second-hand Pike for a very good price. You've gotta be quick to buy reasonably-priced second-hand F3B/J planes - I enquired about several over the last few months but on each occasion was too slow. This time around I sent an email to the guy on the first day the ad was displayed, saying I'd buy it provided there was no serious damage/warps etc. A week or two later the box arrived 
.
At the price I knew it wasn't going to be a looker but I was disappointed to find there'd had been lots of repairs over the years, most of it repaired without a lot of care. The outer wing panels had been repaired and resprayed rather badly - whoever sprayed it didn't even remove or mask over the servos and control rods, they were all covered in paint. The paint on the wings had a matt finish to it, the lip in front of the wing on the fuse had been hastily repaired etc etc. Despite all that everything was solid, straight and strong so it looked like it'd fly well.
The greatest thing in this Pike's favour is a relatively new double-carbon centre section off a Pike WR. This part was in mint condition and absolutely beautifully finished with zero flex - it's no wonder Pikes have such a high reputation. The servos in the wings are digital JRs that have unfortunately developed some slop, but not enough to cause any trouble IMO.
Anyway, I got it ready for flight - which basically required installing a receiver and setting up my radio (I also swapped the nicd rx pack for an eneloop one). Because it looked so ugly I wasn't at all worried about throwing it off Bald Knob on a day with almost no wind. From that moment on any concerns over it's looks vanished as it flew just beautifully! I couldn't have been happier actually, an absolute delight. It's fast yet can stay up in next to no wind. It handles unbelievably well - the easiest plane I have ever flown. Landings were a revelation - I could land it at my feet every time, on a couple of occasions with a light headwind it almost stopped before gently settling to the ground. Only negative I could find was a very slow roll rate but that's to be expected, and I think I can improve it by swapping the aileron servo horns for longer ones (the way it came I couldn't get the recommended aileron throws). I felt so confident the first flight lasted over an hour and included some light DSing at the Camel Hump. Compared to a foamy or my carbon Bird it almost DSes itself (just like Andrew's Fazer BTW). No worries about running out of energy on the back in this light wind.
It's ugliness ended up being a bit of a bonus - I flew it in situations where I wouldn't have dared had it looked nicer. I flew it at Pt Cartwright on one occasion, and the landing area there isn't much bigger than the Pike's wings. The landing was harder than expected as i had to come in over some trees in a rather steep approach and there were lots of people around watching. It was fun to try but not something I'd do too often, the Pike was just too big for that site. Another day I flew it at Bald Knob on a very bumpy day with 25kt+ and the sight of such a big plane doing huge halfpipes and aerobatics was rather amazing to my eyes (having never seen anything like that before). It didn't like the turbulence though and was starting to develop what looked like too much speed at the bottom of the halpipes (flapping wings when hit by turbulence 
). In contrast the Erwin handled those conditions with no complaints.
Over the last few weeks my girlfriend Carla and I went to house sit my parent's place on the NSW mid-north coast while they were on holiday. We had a great time BTW, I really enjoyed getting away from computers for a few weeks! Dad's got a nice big workshop and I needed something to keep me occupied so before I knew what I was doing I'd attacked the Pike's old paint with sandpaper in preparation for a repaint. Long story short it ended up being a huge job and a major learning experience. I'm very happy with the result but had no idea how much work it would be.
I spent quite a bit of time getting a good smooth surface for the paint - the wing tips in particular needed lots of filler primer and sanding to get smooth (lots of waviness from repair work). I remodeled the lip on the fuse in front of the wings using plasti-bond. this came out rather well actually, and stronger than I'd expected.
When it came time to paint I used grey auto-primer followed by Acrylic Lacquer rattle-cans. I'd never done a spray job of this size before so unfortunately made lots of mistakes. Biggest lesson of all was don't spraypaint when there's any moisture in the air! Big mistake! I sprayed some of the red trim on a day when it was raining and it came out matt and a completely different shade of red (lighter and brownish). Fortunately this was fixed by letting it dry a couple of days, remasking and respraying. The other major drama was having the masking tape pull up some of the white base coat in places. I was using low tack masking tape and still don't know exactly why it happened. Makes me worry that the paint won't survive bad landings very well. At least I know I can repair it to look just as good after any damage. One nice thing from the project is I learnt a lot - each part I sprayed looked better than the last, and took less sanding/polishing to get a good finish.
I haven't installed the radio gear etc, but a quick weigh suggests I've added about 200g in paint. Not bad considering how much went on (you don't want to know how many cans it took!!!!). This Pike is now quite overweight as it was already a bit overweight prior to the repaint, and will take a little lead to rebalance (I assume). Won't hurt it on the slope but might not be the best at thermalling I guess.
It's great to see a sudden proliferation in 3M mouldies. Will be great fun to get a number of them in the air at once, and I really look forward to my first winch experience.
Ready for first flight at Bald Knob:
Pike vs Erwin wings. The pike is 3.2M, the Erwin 2M:
Before:
After:
Because of my lack of experience spray painting I went with a simple, high-vis colour scheme. I figured white would be much harder to stuff up than any darker colours. As it turns out the red was much easier to spray...
I managed to get a good finish by wet sanding with 1200 wet-and-dry followed by polishing with Brasso. The Brasso turned out to give much better results than some fancy and expensive auto cut-and-polish I bought for the job. Right now, except for the spots I stuffed up (which are many), and thanks to a ridiculous amount of finish sanding/polishing the finish Looks better than factory mouldie paint. I don't know if it will stay that way as it's a fair bit softer. I reckon it will continue to harden for a couple of weeks yet - it still smells.
Bird vs Pike. The Bird is 1.5M BTW:
Happy to have it finally done:
Mum showing off the underside...
BTW the bottom of the V tail isn't finished in this shot (you can see a red smear from the unfinished polishing job).
.At the price I knew it wasn't going to be a looker but I was disappointed to find there'd had been lots of repairs over the years, most of it repaired without a lot of care. The outer wing panels had been repaired and resprayed rather badly - whoever sprayed it didn't even remove or mask over the servos and control rods, they were all covered in paint. The paint on the wings had a matt finish to it, the lip in front of the wing on the fuse had been hastily repaired etc etc. Despite all that everything was solid, straight and strong so it looked like it'd fly well.
The greatest thing in this Pike's favour is a relatively new double-carbon centre section off a Pike WR. This part was in mint condition and absolutely beautifully finished with zero flex - it's no wonder Pikes have such a high reputation. The servos in the wings are digital JRs that have unfortunately developed some slop, but not enough to cause any trouble IMO.
Anyway, I got it ready for flight - which basically required installing a receiver and setting up my radio (I also swapped the nicd rx pack for an eneloop one). Because it looked so ugly I wasn't at all worried about throwing it off Bald Knob on a day with almost no wind. From that moment on any concerns over it's looks vanished as it flew just beautifully! I couldn't have been happier actually, an absolute delight. It's fast yet can stay up in next to no wind. It handles unbelievably well - the easiest plane I have ever flown. Landings were a revelation - I could land it at my feet every time, on a couple of occasions with a light headwind it almost stopped before gently settling to the ground. Only negative I could find was a very slow roll rate but that's to be expected, and I think I can improve it by swapping the aileron servo horns for longer ones (the way it came I couldn't get the recommended aileron throws). I felt so confident the first flight lasted over an hour and included some light DSing at the Camel Hump. Compared to a foamy or my carbon Bird it almost DSes itself (just like Andrew's Fazer BTW). No worries about running out of energy on the back in this light wind.
It's ugliness ended up being a bit of a bonus - I flew it in situations where I wouldn't have dared had it looked nicer. I flew it at Pt Cartwright on one occasion, and the landing area there isn't much bigger than the Pike's wings. The landing was harder than expected as i had to come in over some trees in a rather steep approach and there were lots of people around watching. It was fun to try but not something I'd do too often, the Pike was just too big for that site
. Another day I flew it at Bald Knob on a very bumpy day with 25kt+ and the sight of such a big plane doing huge halfpipes and aerobatics was rather amazing to my eyes (having never seen anything like that before). It didn't like the turbulence though and was starting to develop what looked like too much speed at the bottom of the halpipes (flapping wings when hit by turbulence 
). In contrast the Erwin handled those conditions with no complaints.Over the last few weeks my girlfriend Carla and I went to house sit my parent's place on the NSW mid-north coast while they were on holiday. We had a great time BTW, I really enjoyed getting away from computers for a few weeks! Dad's got a nice big workshop and I needed something to keep me occupied so before I knew what I was doing I'd attacked the Pike's old paint with sandpaper in preparation for a repaint. Long story short it ended up being a huge job and a major learning experience. I'm very happy with the result but had no idea how much work it would be.
I spent quite a bit of time getting a good smooth surface for the paint - the wing tips in particular needed lots of filler primer and sanding to get smooth (lots of waviness from repair work). I remodeled the lip on the fuse in front of the wings using plasti-bond. this came out rather well actually, and stronger than I'd expected.
When it came time to paint I used grey auto-primer followed by Acrylic Lacquer rattle-cans. I'd never done a spray job of this size before so unfortunately made lots of mistakes. Biggest lesson of all was don't spraypaint when there's any moisture in the air! Big mistake! I sprayed some of the red trim on a day when it was raining and it came out matt and a completely different shade of red (lighter and brownish). Fortunately this was fixed by letting it dry a couple of days, remasking and respraying. The other major drama was having the masking tape pull up some of the white base coat in places. I was using low tack masking tape and still don't know exactly why it happened. Makes me worry that the paint won't survive bad landings very well. At least I know I can repair it to look just as good after any damage. One nice thing from the project is I learnt a lot - each part I sprayed looked better than the last, and took less sanding/polishing to get a good finish.
I haven't installed the radio gear etc, but a quick weigh suggests I've added about 200g in paint. Not bad considering how much went on (you don't want to know how many cans it took!!!!). This Pike is now quite overweight as it was already a bit overweight prior to the repaint, and will take a little lead to rebalance (I assume). Won't hurt it on the slope but might not be the best at thermalling I guess.
It's great to see a sudden proliferation in 3M mouldies. Will be great fun to get a number of them in the air at once, and I really look forward to my first winch experience.
Ready for first flight at Bald Knob:
Pike vs Erwin wings. The pike is 3.2M, the Erwin 2M:
Before:
After:
Because of my lack of experience spray painting I went with a simple, high-vis colour scheme. I figured white would be much harder to stuff up than any darker colours. As it turns out the red was much easier to spray...
I managed to get a good finish by wet sanding with 1200 wet-and-dry followed by polishing with Brasso. The Brasso turned out to give much better results than some fancy and expensive auto cut-and-polish I bought for the job. Right now, except for the spots I stuffed up (which are many), and thanks to a ridiculous amount of finish sanding/polishing the finish Looks better than factory mouldie paint. I don't know if it will stay that way as it's a fair bit softer. I reckon it will continue to harden for a couple of weeks yet - it still smells.
Bird vs Pike. The Bird is 1.5M BTW:
Happy to have it finally done:
Mum showing off the underside...
BTW the bottom of the V tail isn't finished in this shot (you can see a red smear from the unfinished polishing job).
. 
.
.