EGP

magister

The Magister had an unfortunate flight where the ESC literally blew up. It was flying at the far end of the flying area at the club field when it started trailing smoke.

Not good. Within about 2 seconds it was completely uncontrollable and headed down. As I watched, it hit at about 85 degrees nose down in a puff of dust.

 Cessna 172 in CAP colors  Magister in CAP colors
 Magister in CAP colors  Magister in CAP colors

After making the long walk to the crash site I was surprised and pleased to see a fairly intact plane. The wing had come off and the motor mount was shattered. The piece that made up the top of the cowling and windscreen was collapsed and broken in a couple of places, but otherwise things didn’t look too bad—including the battery and motor.

It was interesting to see the small components of the ESC melted into the foam and a larger crater in the bottom of the fuselage where the ESC had been. The repairs fell into a couple of categories. First a new motor mount was ordered and the old one dug out of the foam. Second the crushed cowling was given a hot water bath to reinflate the foam. When dry, CA was used to glue the breaks together.

Since I had the thing in the shop, I decided to do a couple of other mods. First, I took out the single servo that controlled both ailerons and replaced it with independent servos for each wing. Since last flying the Magister, I’d gotten a Spectrum 2.4 GHz radio so out went the old receiver and in went a new one. Last, came new paint. I had been sitting at our club field one day and noticed a pretty CAP Cessna fly over on its way to the nearby general aviation airport. A couple of clicks on Google Images resulted in several nice shots of full scale CAP planes. Out came the masking tape and airbrush and you can see the results.

For those who care about such things, the paint is the acrylic craft paint that comes in small bottles at craft stores such as Michaels or the craft section of the local Walmart. It was thinned with windshield washer fluid and applied with a double action airbrush. The decals were touched up in PAINT.net, a free image editing program. I scaled them and embedded them in PowerPoint to lay them out for printing. They’re printed on 8.5x11in Avery mailing label sheets. The entire model got a coat of WBP to seal the decals and give the plane a gloss surface.

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