Here the pics of my glider, reinforced with CF rods and tubes. The LE and TE are cracked owing to transport mishaps and needs to be fixed. I'll post the assembled glider later this week.

The pics shown are (1), tail, (2) fuse with wing mount and tail fin, (3) close up of wing mount, (4) wing. The wing is mounted on the mount and there are strings on the wing that hook to the mount forming a curvy wing. The nose of the fuse is clad in rubber and can be opened to position an iron ball for balance.

Thanks for posting the pics tg. Thats a very nice design! The wing mount is giving me some new ideas already

The wing mount is shaped to an air foil but the airfoil of the wing is flat otherwise. Same for the tail. Will post a few more pics.

More pics. (1) tail with the slot for the elevator, (2) close up of the nose with rubber shoe (3) reverse of the wing, the spars are CF rods (2mm) that are attached to the LE and TE rods.

Actually, this is a glider-kite that I had purchased long back for ~$10 but is pretty good if you have a slope to fly it from and don't mind hiking up and down after each throw.

some progress finally..
Replaced the carbon fiber tail boom with PVC tube, little heavier but with much less flex.
Installed most of the electronics.

Added a coro tail for test flights. This will be later replaced by a CF and fabric arangment similar to the wing.

may i suggest something ?

yes please!

Re=ρVL/μ. 'Re' is called the Reynolds number, a dimensionless ratio of Inertial Forces to viscous forces in a fluid reaction. ρ is air density, V is the fluid velocity L is the length in question and μ is the dynamic viscosity, forget rest of the equation and look at only 'length (L)', when you apply it mathematically at a zero chord (L= zero) Re is zero. At zero Re, stall speed is zero and so is the stall α, which means the tip and area near is forever in stalled state,  Re increases as the chord increases, and so does the stall speed and the stall α, which also increases slowly. In fact last 20% of the double bow wing tip will not produce any usable lift. on the contrary it will produce more drag and add to the weight. But I understand you want it to be man-portable and want to keep the design simple isn't? there are two options
(a) have the last 10% chord bending backwards to form a finite chord when you tighten it (you can break it and and put a mechanical stop to prevent from bending further, something like the retract)
(b) you can rig it in a manner that when you taut it the tips crank to form a kind of Tip Fence (Like the tip of a easy star). both of which will highly enhance your lift, directional stability, dynamic lateral stability and reduce the span.

My personal opinion, take it with a pinch of salt, you are more wise than me as you are producing it hands on.   all the best  

Thanks for the tip augustinev.
Now that i see it, i also feel that a huge chunk of the span is getting wasted. Still i cant figure out a simple way of fixing this.
The plane weighs 910 grams right now with all the electronics and a 2200 mAh battery, the fabric will add extra 60 grams. So i think it is safe for a test flight. However i'll need all the lift i can get out of that span as i'll be adding a 150 grams camera to it.
May be i can attach an extra aluminium tube angle to both tips. Got to put some thought into it...

Trapeze planform with a taper ratio of 0.4 to 0.5 can be looked at, shouldn't be too hard. ran some simulations on your model, math model with zero tip chord failed. I put some arbitrary small tip chord, results are different every time, my experience, you will have hard time balancing her laterally, she WILL wing drop easily, be careful during steep turns and landing,

Yes, thats what i am thinking about.
And thanks for running the sim, now i know what to look out for

Wings made from newspaper covered with packing tape.
ps: I need two servo extensions for this bird, can anyone(pancard club flyers) bring two extension tomorrow so that we can test this bird.

Looks cool..  Let us know how she flew.

hi, great looking model, you did not indicate about the flex earlier, if your are going to fly with this amount of flex should not be an issue, spanwise flow will be minimized. will be highly stable and easy to fly, initially don't do steep turns and wing over , take it from there, all the best, eager to know the outcome.

Have you actually flown this - ?

It will tip stall very easily

Saikat, my suspicion too, see rep #34 and #36

Yes - read .... and concur -

It fact I see now that said model does not have ailerons - will
be unflyable unless you have the CG very forward.

Control will be marginal at best

Quote from: saikat on January 22, 2011, 06:20:39 PM
unless you have the CG very forward.

good idea, why don't you try increasing the boom length and reduce the elevator and rudder size (Keeping the elev and rud power same by increasing the moment arm)

conversely, what the heck, go ahead prove us wrong.

Thanks for the comments guys and sorry for the late response!
I'm absolutely not worried about failure right now, I'll be happy to get back from the field even with half the electronics it's an experiment right!
About the boom, thats the longest I can go right now without making it tail heavy.

Finally got a chance to maiden it today. And guess what "It flies"
The plane was tail heavy, so had to tape a wrench to the nose to get the CG right.
The flight was easy, not any noticeable bad characteristic except for the nose tipping up which can be easily corrected by adjusting thrust angle. I am sure this thing can haul a brick if it has to
Now I am planning to build a new fuse for it. Anyways check out the video.

Edit: initially the plane was tail heavy after taping the wrench it became nose heavy.

It was great to see this baby fly..Great work Amit..

Nice one -

learnt something today