Ken Ryan
DH98 Mosquito -
Background:
The de Havilland Mosquito was a British combat aircraft that excelled in versatility during the Second World War. Originally conceived as an unarmed fast bomber, the Mosquito adapted to many other roles during the air war where it saw service in the European theatre, the Pacific theatre of Operations and the Mediterranean Theater, including: low to medium altitude daytime tactical bomber, high altitude night bomber, pathfinder, day or night fighter, fighter-bomber, intruder, maritime strike and fast photo reconnaissance aircraft carrying out aerial reconnaissance
Kit:
My girlfriend bought me the Black Horse Mosquito kit for Christmas 2008, the kit has a wingspan of 1600mm and a length of 1230mm so its quite a big plane. Its really well made and comes with retracts for the undercarriage -
Making the kit is really easy, the first change to the standard kit I made was to the retract system. The kit is designed to operate a single servo system via wire links but I had read on forums that this was giving problems. I decided to mount individual servos in each nacelle -
After some initial problems with a weak linkage bar this system has proven to work well, wheels tempoaraily attached and control servos in place -
The tail surfaces caused me some problems to get lined up needing a fair bit of packing on the right side for the tail -
Next up where the original motors which I later upgraded, I used CC45 ESC's without the onboard BEC
Followed by 3 bladed propellors and alloy spinners, these arent scale but I like the look of them -
Next up where the electrics, this is quite complex as there are 8 servos in total in this plane so dealing with the electrics is quite difficult. As the wings are removable for trnasport I decided to use 15 pin D-SUB connectors to make the junctions as it was the easiest way of keeping everythign tidy, it has worked really well -
The junction with the rest of the electrics can be seen here -
I made a power distribution board to protect the receiver due to the load of all the servos, again this has worked well, for safety I have gone with a 2.4Ghz radio system -
After completeing the model it was time to start flying tests. Initially this did not go well as the plane kept veering to the left on take off, again forums to the rescue plus stories about the full size Mosquito needing right rudder on take off due to the torque from the motors (I am not using counter rotating propellors) So the technique for take off was full right rudder plus full back elevator to keep the tail down. Flying was fantastic very easy to control however due to my lack of experience with planes landing was very difficult as the speeds needed, even with full flaps, to prevent stalling was quite high leading ultimately to a bad crash. Here is my mossie ready for intial flights