Disappointed with the flimsy plastic wing struts this plane comes with, I decided to make my own rigid set from carbon fiber and aluminum tubing.


The finished set is only twotenths of a gram (0.2g) heavier per wing than the stock plastic ones, so no weight penalties.


I have a second wing for another plane I am modding with a twopiece spar and have deleted the struts entirely, so I removed the four stock strut mounting plates no longer needed on the bottomside of wing #2 and reused a pair of them for this project to provide a mounting point on the fuselage.


Materials:
2mm carbon tubing with a 1mm bore.

3mm aluminum tubing with a 2mm bore.


The mounting screws on the wings were replaced with RC car body clips for toolless breakdown and assembly.







Next, I decided to add functional flaps to the wings using balsa wood and shrink film covering to form the aerodynamic control surfaces. I used channel 5 (GEAR) to operate the flaps in unison using a servo lead Ycable, since I am already using channel 6 (FLAPS) for the ESC. A pair of Eflite linear servos move the flaps, hung on Dubro #118 mini nylon hinges along with the new ailerons.


The balsa wood flaps are covered in TowerKote film in Cub Yellow (similar to Monokote). To improve the look I decided to remove the foam ailerons entirely and fab a flapmatching balsa set to replace them too.


This pretty much completes this project. Now to move on to A160 project #2 (my PARTSbuilt J3 Cub with the sparred wing). Hope to get back to flight tests soon.


Happy flying!