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hinge tape will need to be added to the top of the built in hinge joint.  For now the living hinge works well.

The supplied control rods have a built in V bend that allows manual adjustment for leveling the elevons during assembly.  Personally, I have never liked this method of adjustment or having a control rod with built in springiness.  I will at some time in the future change over to a carbon rod arrangement but for now everything is stock.

The motor is the standard GWS IPS motor/gearbox system, geared at 3.5:1 with an 8 x 4.3 GWS prop.  The motor assembly presses on to the motor mount stick, which is glued into the wing panels.  Trick does not supply a heatsink for the motor but recommends it.  Personally, I think that for a buck, they should have thrown the heatsink into the kit.  The ESC is a 5-amp unit and should be able to handle the current draw of the motor system easily.  The system arms by pulling the stick low for a few seconds and hearing a small tone – an LED on the board also lights up and can be seen if the ESC is positioned below the air outflow hole located at the rear of the radio bay in the hatch cover.

The servos press into molded holes designed specifically for the HiTec HS-55 servos.  There are molded channels in the bottom of the wing for the servo leads and the antenna wire from the receiver.  You cover the wires with some clear tape.  This is easy and works well.  I used some Scotch Crystal Clear tape, same as packing tape.  Outside of gluing the 2 wing panels together, the only other places you use glue is to glue the supplied control horns to the elevons and to glue the motor mount stick into its slot that is molded into the wing panels.

Installation of the receiver, battery pack and ESC is just a matter of applying some Velcro and sticking things in place.  I just sort of let the ESC float in the space behind the battery.  Extra antenna wire is wound up on part of a popsicle stick and glued between the sides of the electronics bay behind the receiver.  All of this is covered in the assembly manual.  When you are done, you end up with what I must say, is one slick looking aircraft and Yes, IT LOOKS LIKE A HOT ROD!

 

Flight Report

So on to the fun part.  Now first thing you must realize is that they advertise this plane as a parkflyer.  So your expectation as such should first be tempered by this realization.  After all the power plant is really just the standard parkflyer motor/gearbox assembly that is in literally hundreds of different parkflyers, though with different gear ratios and props.  There is only so much power you can squeeze out of the thing.

On the other hand they did say that it FLEW LIKE A ZAGI, so you kind of expect that it will be a parkflyer on a bit of steroids.  I own a Zagi 400X, so I know what that plane is capable of and I sort of expected the Fixx to match it but more sedately of course, as it is still a parkflyer.

Took it out about 5:30pm on March 16th< to have at it with the 2 battery packs that I had.  As the plane had balanced exactly where it was supposed to when assembling it per the manual, I didn’t bother with a test glide.  Powered it up, tossed it and it took off without a problem.  I didn’t need any up or down, left or right.  It did want to climb a bit under power but I decided to leave the controls where they were.  Control throws were not mentioned anywhere in the manual, so I just flew it at the full throws that the servos were capable of. 

Loops – With the battery just off the charger and the plane immediately put in the air, the plane will just barely pull a loop.  Beyond that you must dive it some to gain enough speed to loop the plane.

Rolls – The plane will NOT roll from level flight.  I tried a number of times.  The only way to sort of do a roll, is to first get it into a knife edge attitude, then kick the elevons hard to get it into an inverted position.  Looking at the video of the Fixx flying again (at least the video I have), they also did this to get the plane inverted and never did a true roll.

Inverted – Flies great inverted.  Not much backpressure needed to keep it level. It flies essen

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