In the New Year, my children persuaded me to buy a
Silverlit X-twin R/C bi-wing airplane (which was on Sale) in
Maplin whilst I was looking for some hard drive enclosures. This post is about how I broke the tail of this toy plane and how I eventually fixed it.
Back at home on that day of purchase, the children didn't need to plod me to set off to the nearest open space near my house. The first fifteen minutes or so we flew the airplane quite well. On couple of occasions, it got stuck onto lower branches of nearby trees and on one instance it flew into a fenced backyard of a neighbour's house. We managed to get the airplane back on all the occasions. It all seemed to go okay until I pushed my luck just that bit more, wherein I flew the airplane into some high branches of a tree. It took some out-of-the-box thinking to get the plane down. During the process of bringing it down, the major part of the tail got ripped apart thereby ruining the airplane's ability to fly. The children were really disappointed with what had happened. To wipe the disappointment off their faces, I promised that I would get the tail fixed. This post is about the quest of getting the airplane's tail fixed.
Immediately after we got back to the house that day, I searched the internet to see if anyone had faced a similar problem in the past. I also checked whether I could buy a spare tail from the original manufacturer. My search was futile because no one had faced this particular problem before, probably because it is very unusual and rare for a airplane to loose its tail, unless it had a mishap similar to ours. Furthermore, the original manufacturer only stocked propellers and not the tail sections. We thus had to give up the idea of fixing the tail at least for the time being.
Whilst shopping at a supermarket a couple of days later, I found an empty cardboard placeholder for Garnier Moisturizing Cream, which I felt might do the job for us. I later went on to cut a few different sizes of elevator and rudder sections. Unfortunately none of them worked. I got onto the internet to see, if there are any photographs of the tail section, so that I could cut the cardboard to match the exact dimensions. I found one as below.
I cut the cardboard to match the dimensions as per the photograph. Still we had no luck in getting the airplane to fly. The problem was most probably due to the fact that the weight of the cardboard was different in comparison to styrofoam. We felt that we might never see this airplane fly again.
Last weekend, whilst eating at Costco (off styrofoam plates) an idea suddenly struck upon me - why not use these plates - especially because the material and thickness resembled that of the original airplane tail section. We had a couple of spare plates left over, which we expected would do the job for us.
This weekend, I cut the plates to match the dimensions of the earlier cardboard sections, duplicated from the manufacturer's photographs. I glued the sections to the airplane hoping that finally we might get this airplane to fly. Once outdoors we did a few test runs on our driveway to see whether it was worth the trouble we had taken and to our surprise the airplane flew. Later in the afternoon, we went to a nearby open space to fly it for a longer duration.
Surprise! Surprise! the airplane flew really well. It was nice to see the smiles back on my children's faces. During the course of that afternoon, we learnt to do circular manoeuvers and make soft landings, which we didn't manage on the misfortunate first day.
A few photographs of the exercise of getting the tail fixed onto the airplane.....
