BH Blitz mini F18

[19000rpm]

Ok. On to another of these little EDF airframe kit's from Banana Hobby.

This one is the F18 in the, ever popular, Blue Angels paint scheme.

The package was complete and in good condition. The foam was undamaged. There were pieces of harware floating around and I anticipated a piece or two might be missing. Wrong. Everything was there.

Unlike the mini Mig this one comes with a fixed landing gear, lots of rockets and is scaled somewhat smaller than the Mig.

I'm not going to use the gear, as yet, so the rockets and the gear will be put aside as long as I keep it as a belly lander. It's either that or gluing the rockets back on after every landing. ;D

A major difference with this plane and the Mig is that it uses just two servos, so it's set up with a Delta mix. The Delta mix requires that one servo is plugged into the elevator slot and the other into the aileron slot on the Rx.

The Delta mix causes both the elevator and aileron to move in the same direction on each side of the wing. So you get up aileron with up elevator and down aileron and down elevator on both sides of the fuse in the vertical plane and in a right bank both the aileron and elevator go up on the right side and down on the left side and so on. Pretty neat way to keep the weight down.

The airframe kit comes with 50mm fan, the motor and all the hardware. I added the HobbyPartz Detrium 25A ESC, two sv80 long wire, 8 gram, servos from Parkzone and a 1000mAh 20C Sky Lipo also from HobbyPartz. Exactly the same setup as I used on the mini Mig. Except, this time around, I used an AR6110 Rx because the fuse is so narrow it seemed the best fit.

First, before I did any foam assembly, I set up the servos, ESC, battery and Rx, since it was all in, or on, the fuse and bound the Tx. When I was setting up the Tx the elevator and aileron both required reversing.

Most of the assembly time was spent on the electrical components. Measuring, cutting and soldering of wiring to fit the fuse layout. The ESC wiring was made very short on the motor end and on the battery end a few inches was added.

It takes a bit of fiddling to get the wiring just right and the fan and motor seated and the fan access hatch on with out pinching any wiring or distorting the fan housing. Kind of like working on smaller helis.

Foam assembly time is about a half hour; tops. Wings, vertical stabs, and horizontal stabs and elevators and the control horns. That's it. This time I used 5 min. Epoxy. instead of hot glue.

The CG was dead on according to the manual at 2.65". Of course, it was "dead on" with the Mig too and that didn't prove to be accurate. Proof will be in the flying, as they say.

I'll post some pics on the next post.

[19000rpm]

Something's wrong with the camera so no pics of the F/A18 ;D

Well, I flew it. This thing is difficult to hand launch. At least for me. Or, that could be the reason for the landing gear. 2 out of the 3 launches went badly. Probably just my technique.

Extremly fast for such a little plane. Much faster than the mini Mig. Fast roll rate too. It flies very well at low speeds too.

I'm thinking about adding the landing gear since my hand launches with this bird stink. Then I think about the extra weight of the gear. Maybe I'll just work on the hand launch. Maybe I'll get it right before I destroy it playing lawn dart.

[Solitaire]

Unlike others, it sounds like you're getting reasonably good service from BH.

[19000rpm]

Yep sol, I've been a lot luckier than many other guys. So far all is good. I've got a couple of other BH planes on my list and still have the mini F35 to build. So, will my luck hold or... Only time will tell.

[19000rpm]

Here's some pics of the F/A18. If I were smarter I would have placed something next to it to illustrate how small this thing really is.




If you look closely you'll see where I broke the left wing off in a very bad launch.




The delta wing mix using one servo on each side

This thing really rips for such a small plane.

[akent]

That's a cute little guy!

If you remember that little EPP F-22, that uses the same aileron/elevator (elevon) delta arrangement as that F-18. I am not sure I've ever seen that done anywhere, before these planes!

With that arrangement, up elevator gives you spoilerons, so I wonder how well it does high alpha?
Kent

[19000rpm]

I've still got my little EPP F-22 I built from the plans you passed along. I never got around to adding the ailerons so it's just the elevons. It needs a new ESC. One too many wet grass landings. I think I might have flown that plane more often than any other last season.

I haven't tried any real high alpha with the F/A18 yet, but I'd think it's going to be pretty good.

Not only the BH F/A18 comes with the delta mix configuration, but the F35 (still in the box) and the F16 (I'm going to order) and the AMX also use it. I think it is a great setup for this type and size plane.