Official Freewing MiG-29 Fulcrum Twin 80mm Thread

[janmb]

Oops, you are right. None the less there were loose servo connections behind one of the wing interconnection plates on mine. I assume he did check connections on the MCBe...

I have checked my wing boards too (had to remove them temporarily since I upgraded flap servos) - mine were mostly fine, but obviously double checked proper seating before reassembling the board to the wing.

As for the retracts, they were nicely seated in the blue box. But as I said, I removed the faulty gear entirely from the model and tested separately - to isolate the issue as much as possible.

Split open the retract unit today to inspect for obvious faults - none found.

[mshagg]

I have checked my wing boards too (had to remove them temporarily since I upgraded flap servos) - mine were mostly fine, but obviously double checked proper seating before reassembling the board to the wing.

As for the retracts, they were nicely seated in the blue box. But as I said, I removed the faulty gear entirely from the model and tested separately - to isolate the issue as much as possible.

Split open the retract unit today to inspect for obvious faults - none found.

As youre no doubt aware, they're designed to quit moving when they sense a current draw spike; I assume via some sort of shunt resistor on the PCB.

I've had retracts that started working again just from cracking them open and reassembling - I guess the jack screw was binding up on something.

A great MRC support story though!

[leithalweapon]

I had one main retract stop working. All I did was unplug the mains at the blue box and plugged them back in and it's worked since. Not a big confidence builder though.

[32Racing]

Put three flights on the MiG today. I bypassed the y-harness's on the elevators and throttles/ESC's to each have a channel in the receiver, which is on the left side of the aft battery tray. Balance was ~10mm aft of the marks with two SMC 5200's in the rear and mid battery trays. I see no way how people are able to run 800g+ batteries without being nose heavy.





With the issues circling about blanking the stab, and the potential that having the bombs/missiles on there helps, I put the two missiles on the inboard stations (in line with the stab). Flew two 3:30 flights, added quite a bit of up elevator trim, and it just felt a bit unstable, quick to build alpha, and just generally uncomfortable. This is my first scale jet foamy, so I thought maybe I just needed to step my game up. On the third flight, I pulled the ordnance off, and boom, everything woke up and became super stable and solid. Had a great flight, and can't wait to go back for more!

[Evan D]

Good report! I have only flown mine W/O stores. I seldom fly any plane with any stores.

[Gringotuerto]

Good report! I have only flown mine W/O stores. I seldom fly any plane with any stores.

LOL, you just informed every Freewing F14 and F16 pilot that there is an easy unarmed target out there.

[DCORSAIR]

Good report! I have only flown mine W/O stores. I seldom fly any plane with any stores.

That's funny, I can't fly without stores, they just look to plain without, the F-16, F-15, A-10, A-4, F-4, all look awesome loaded up.

[GliderGuy]

Good report! I have only flown mine W/O stores. I seldom fly any plane with any stores.

My comments below are intended to denote how diverse a crowd we RC pilots are. And that's a great thing. We continue to learn more about the MiG and post for the edification of all. Many have done some fairly major changes to the innards and control set-ups. All pretty cool stuff!

These are my personal perceptions regarding the MiG after making several hundred flights. The below is intended to provide those who are soon-to-maiden with a level of comfort and another point of view based upon one guy's perceptions which all are free to consider with a grain of salt.

For your consideration...my perceptions:

• The bird is stable and well harmonized on the controls
• Has a crisp/nice response to all control inputs...low or high rate settings (obviously faster on high)
• Inverted flight requires only a touch of forward stick
• It is rock solid on final approach and so dang easy to land
  • There is plenty of elevator authority to easily raise the nose on landing...she pretty well holds the alpha attitude you want, once established. You don't have to work at it. Only a touch of up elevator command is needed to raise the nose to landing attitude.
    • I reduce power to about 25% on downwind and reduce to about 15% on final. Once over the fence, I reduce power to zero and let her float down in a nose-positive attitude...touching nicely on the mains with little effort or control input needed. If it is calm, you don't move anything once your attitude is set.
• Has plenty of power for my wants
• No pitch change is noticed when cruising and changing from low to full throttle (negative flap effect?...see below)
• Handles cross winds very well and feels comfortable up to the 12-13 mph down-the-runway winds i've flown her in
• Other than my early-on brush with the falling leaf deep stall (almost not recovered from) on about flight #50, the MiG has not given me any concern regarding its handling characteristics. And several have since posted the recovery technique for getting out of the falling leaf deep stall. Thanks to those who did
• Rock solid radio link...RF chokes helping? They can't hurt!

Out of the box:
I was anxious to get the MiG airborne, but I still spent about 3-4 hours going over the MiG and taking the time to make sure it was airworthy. Part of this time was spent making the stronger elevator push rods discussed in several prior posts in this forum. I also added the ferrite RF filter chokes discussed at length in prior forum posts. Since I was using Admiral Pro 6000s for my AL37, that was to be my default choice of power. Everything else was left stock. The approach was KEEP IT SIMPLE and use recommended book set-ups to get her in the air ASAP.
When the AD email arrived from MRC about the elevator servos, I considered staying grounded until they arrived. But, several subsequent posts about the history of the standard servo gave me confidence that a maiden would be OK as long as it was flown conservatively.

Maiden Results:
Low rate...Successful and enjoyable maiden flight requiring about 3 clicks of up elevator trim. You can't ask for a better result than this. Stock servos were used.

Set-up Details for those who about to maiden: Pretty much totally by the book

• Add-on Ferrite RF noise filters installed on the ESC wiring
• No gyro
• No EXPO and No flap/elevator mix
• Receiver sits in the front bay / nothing around it
• Extended the UBEC wire so that it sits in the right wing root bay area beside the rear battery
• Everything connected through the blue box for the maiden (see "Aside" below)
• Pylons/missiles on...in fact they are glued on. No flights w/o them.
• Admiral Pro 6000s / rear and middle battery bay. Had to trim out a touch of foam from the hatch inside roof to accommodate the middle battery
  • Rear battery sits as far back as possible / middle battery sits as far back as possible...it bumps right up against the blue box
• CG spot on the mark. The bird sat level the first time I lifted it with fingers on the CG mark. Wheels down / lid on / missiles/pylons on / batteries installed / nose cone installed
• I've always flown the MiG with pylons/missiles on. Even the maiden flight. I like the look, and was not compelled to try a "no load" flight
• Elevator trim was set at the book 1 mm....ended up being 3-to-4 mm (see photo below) after the first flight
• One flap push rod was a bit too long and beyond ball link adjustment to align flush with the aileron (aileron flush with the tip area of the wing)
  • I didn't want to mess with adjusting the push rod length, so I adjusted the other flap to match. About 2 mm of negative flap was the result
    • I did not adjust the ailerons to be flush with the flaps
      • Negative flap is a drag reducing and pitch adjusting trick used in full size sailplanes, so I figured it would be fine this way (see photo below)
• Positive full flap = 30 mm. I saw this during the build as more than book but figured that was close enough to book. I glued a physical stop to my transmitter’s flap vernier knob to meet the needs of another plane. This stop limits the rotation of the vernier knob to about 50%
• I'm happy with the MiG's response on low rates, and I am just as happy with her response on high rates. Depends on what type of flight I am doing

Aside:

• Had to replace the nose gear servo...it became intermittent after about 20 flights or so. No issues since replacing it
• Received the upgrade servos and bypassed the blue box with the "Y" wire provided with the servos
• While one of the upgrade servos had the positive wire code and one had the reverse servo wire code (white red black), both were positive servos. I had taileron function w/o invoking the taileron function just by moving the elevator. That would have been interesting.
  • MRC was quick to confirm the servo assembly error and scheduled a replacement to ship "as soon as the next batch arrives". After about a week of daily "no joy' updates from MRC, I opened the incorrectly wired servo and re-wired it to be a reverse servo. This is a simple task in concept, but that's a small/tight soldering space to work in and tiny wires too. Regardless, the wiring conversion to reverse was successful, and I told MRC to give the one scheduled for me to someone else when the shipment arrives

Happy Maidens!

-GG

Photo showing the amount of negative flap and the amount of elevator trim I'm flying with.
<Not really that much elevator trim considering the heavy batteries being used and the CG being on the mark>
Note: In full scale sailplanes, negative flap imparts a nose-up pitch effect. Maybe that's why I'm not carrying a lot more elevator trim?

[Scale Master]

External ordinance weathering and detail complete. Special thanks again to Chris (mshagg)! You da man!

[Scale Master]

That's funny, I can't fly without stores, they just look to plain without, the F-16, F-15, A-10, A-4, F-4, all look awesome loaded up.

Yezzir!! I agree 1000%!!

[mshagg]

External ordinance weathering and detail complete. Special thanks again to Chris (mshagg)! You da man!

I think you mean to thank dirtydee for the BM81 :)

One more tweak to make to the FAB 500lb bomb (so it will accept the standard freewing hardpoint mount) and I'll post it to thingiverse.

[Scale Master]

I think you mean to thank dirtydee for the BM81 :)

One more tweak to make to the FAB 500lb bomb (so it will accept the standard freewing hardpoint mount) and I'll post it to thingiverse.

Yes you correct! dirtydee is the man! I can't wait to complete this twin Turbine conversion and get her in the air!

[meadowhay]

Simple add on anti collision beacon using a spare red LED salvaged from my broken Avanti and plugged into a strobe output on the MCB-E.
Additional landing lights to follow (full size has 3)

You Tube link

https://youtu.be/OhaooONcKx4p

[nuts-n-volts]

My comments below are intended to denote how diverse a crowd we RC pilots are. And that's a great thing. We continue to learn more about the MiG and post for the edification of all. Many have done some fairly major changes to the innards and control set-ups. All pretty cool stuff!

These are my personal perceptions regarding the MiG after making several hundred flights. The below is intended to provide those who are soon-to-maiden with a level of comfort and another point of view based upon one guy's perceptions which all are free to consider with a grain of salt.

Nice write-up GG. Considering you have hundreds of flights, aykm!, I consider your information quite valuable as well as useful to many who may have been anxious about this jet from the beginning. Solid set-up and inside info. Always good. I'm looking forward to trying the flap reflex with mine. Thanks!

[Dirty Dee]

Scale Master looks great! an FYI, the ones I sent you are meant for the inboard pylons, otherwise they stick out ~40mm further forward on the outboard 2 stations. if you run them side by side (like in your earlier picture) they will be parallel to one another instead of aligned with the leading edge. If you will need me to print you another pair I would print the variant with a shifted attachment location.

But otherwise if you keep your loadout with them between the 2 missiles, it looks like it works out too.

[Scale Master]

Scale Master looks great! an FYI, the ones I sent you are meant for the inboard pylons, otherwise they stick out ~40mm further forward on the outboard 2 stations. if you run them side by side (like in your earlier picture) they will be parallel to one another instead of aligned with the leading edge. If you will need me to print you another pair I would print the variant with a shifted attachment location.

But otherwise if you keep your loadout with them between the 2 missiles, it looks like it works out too.

Thanks for the explanation! Yeah I changed my mind on what station to put them on once I got them lol. It still looks good and symmetrical like you said so I'm gonna probably leave it alone . Thanks again for everything!

[janmb]

As youre no doubt aware, they're designed to quit moving when they sense a current draw spike; I assume via some sort of shunt resistor on the PCB.

I've had retracts that started working again just from cracking them open and reassembling - I guess the jack screw was binding up on something.

A great MRC support story though!

Thanks. I am indeed aware.

When I split the faulty retract open, I did inspect the switches. (this model apparently uses two micro switches to sense end-points, rather than a simple amp reading which is more usual.

In either case, messing with those made no difference.

Quite pressed for time these days anyway, so rather take the replacement and move on, than spend a lot of further time debugging.

[PieterO]

Yesterday I did my maiden. Wow, really impressed by the grass ops! As you can see on the picture, the grass was really tall and wet. Even my Avanti would have had issues with this grass. But not the Mig. It took off without any issues and it didn't even need that much runway.

Also the rest of the flight was by the book. Like many recommended, I had my CG 10mm behind the CG mark. For the control surface throws, I used the middle of the low and high rates. Worked perfect for me! Regarding trim: one tick for elevator and one for aileron was enough.

As many mentioned before: the plane indeed flies great and lands so easy!

No complaints? Well, maybe a small one:

After hardly 3.15 minutes of flight (total, from start to end), my 4500 mah admirals only had 3.82V left per cell. But the flight wasn't even mixed throttle: I only used full power at the take off. Rest of the flight was half throttle or less. So I'm a little but worried what will happen after 3 or 4 full speed low passes.

I'm curious by the way: what would happen to the amperage when going from half throttle to full throttle? Will it double? Of multiply by 4? Or somewhere in between?

[Simjet67]

Hello Hobbysquawk, here is my first ever post.

Its been agony having to wait so long for these to reach the UK, but I had my first four flights on the Mig today.

Mine is stock setup, but for peace of mind I did go ahead and swapped out the elevator servos and bypassed the blue box.

Really nice and easy flyer, but on stock cg position it is definitely a touch nose heavy, which in fairness makes it quite predictable and docile, but it shows limitations during rolling and inverted maneuvers, moving it back by the suggested 1/2" cleans it up nicely. Rolls are more axial and inverted requires far less downwards stick pressure.

I have the FW Mig 21, F15 and F4 and I get the feeling that this will be a great addition, at the moment the #1 flying favourite is my Mig 21, just so accurate and menacing.

Anyway, the forum has been useful, so thanks to all of you that posted and shared your experience!

For the record, I also believe that the well documented crashes were caused by extreme nose heaviness, nothing more, probably caused by an incorrect interpretation of where the batteries should actually go.

I love the FW planes that I have, in terms of sheer looks, flyability and value for money they are nothing short of incredible.

Looking forward to many more enjoyable sessions with it!!

[James]

Hello Hobbysquawk, here is my first ever post.

Its been agony having to wait so long for these to reach the UK, but I had my first four flights on the Mig today.

Mine is stock setup, but for peace of mind I did go ahead and swapped out the elevator servos and bypassed the blue box.

Really nice and easy flyer, but on stock cg position it is definitely a touch nose heavy, which in fairness makes it quite predictable and docile, but it shows limitations during rolling and inverted maneuvers, moving it back by the suggested 1/2" cleans it up nicely. Rolls are more axial and inverted requires far less downwards stick pressure.

I have the FW Mig 21, F15 and F4 and I get the feeling that this will be a great addition, at the moment the #1 flying favourite is my Mig 21, just so accurate and menacing.

Anyway, the forum has been useful, so thanks to all of you that posted and shared your experience!

For the record, I also believe that the well documented crashes were caused by extreme nose heaviness, nothing more, probably caused by an incorrect interpretation of where the batteries should actually go.

I love the FW planes that I have, in terms of sheer looks, flyability and value for money they are nothing short of incredible.

Looking forward to many more enjoyable sessions with it!!

So happy to read this and welcome to the Squawk Simjet67 !