Few more bits arrived today.
My poor old Red Ranger Bush Basher destroyed all its struts and wing mounts, due to other parts failing and badly designed brittle hard white plastic components snapping off during flight.
Will beef these up these new parts with Epoxy at the critical areas I have learnt that fail before fitting to the Aircraft in hope of giving it the best chance possible of actually holding together in normal Grandma flight manoeuvers let alone anything more āspritedā.
Have also modified my new Yellow Ranger to run the larger KINGFISHER 11" by 7 pitch Propeller over the standard 10" by 5 pitch Prop, purely because of the extra weight and drag of being fitted with Floats instead of the original Ground Aircraft that everything was designed for effortlessly rolling on wheels out of the box.
The second reason for this modification is that the RANGER originally comes with a ālatch onā Prop Spinner thatās designed to āpop offā if thereās a crash or Prop Strike to prevent damaging the whole system if new Pilots have an āincidentā when learning to fly/land.
Itās a good system, but when you modify the Aircraft to take off and land on water, a simple little water spray will flex the Prop blades enough to āunlatchā the Spinner, launching it into the murkey depths never to be seen again!
Obviously not an issue with a learner Pilot who pops off the Spinner where it falls onto the ground and can simply walk over and pick it up ā¦ but water bourne activities with both Aircraft and Speedboats adds a whole new dimension when it comes to being able to recover parts when things go wrong!
I did fit internal flotation foam into those standard Spinners to save having to continually replace them, but it wears pretty thin when every takeoff and landing loses a Spinner and requires the Emergency Sea Rescue Kayak having to be deployed for such a simple and tiny part coming off and bobbing way out in the middle of the Weir.
So now I have customised the new Yellow RANGER to overcome all the weaknesses of the original Red crash test dummy by replacing with the 3 piece KINGFISHER Prop and threaded Spinner system.
Fitting the bigger Prop is no issue, as Iāve already replaced the stock Ground Running 20A ESC with a 45A Speedboat ESC that is designed specifically for constant full Amperage to overcome constant water drag forces in a single Speedboat Hull, and is now having to power TWO Hulls dragging through the water and air at a constant rate.
The last jobs on the list are to go through and replace all the stock plastic geared Ground Aircraft dry Servos with my newly acquired full metal geared Digital Programmable Stainless Steel Waterproof Servos on the RANGERāS/KINGFISHER/MAULE/HUSKY etc ā¦ but now having to figure out how Iām going to extend the Servo wires to the correct length to be able to fit them in place of the stock units that are about a foot longer!
Iām just happy that for parts costing less than $7 delivered to Western Australia within 10 days, that I can still easily access these simple components to be able to get the old $270 busted arse Red bush basher RANGER back into the air at this point before tackling all of the rest!
I reckon Iāll just continue glueing and sticky taping this old girl back together, thrashing it as much as possible until thereās nothing left!
