About a month ago I got a text from a friend who knew this saying he could get a deal on a video Aerial Systems Specter V3. That's when the adventure began.
For the last month I have been building the thing. I've been spoiled on the FliteTest construction method using hot glue and foam board, so I found the new method of glueing and laminating hotwire cut foam a bit awkward at first. Having only half of the video instructions online didn't really help either..
So I decided I better get my build log out there in case it may help some others along..
All of the parts were there! Woot!
After smashing the blind nuts too hard into the plywood pieces for the wing mount, I gave up and decided just to glue the wing on. This is about where the instructions ended.
Laminating then gluing the booms to the tail was probably not the best next step to take because somewhere some deformation occurred...
After waiting for the glue to dry I found the horizontal stabilizer to be at a slight angle/curve when compared to the wing :(
Getting a little antsy, and coming across some bright orange tape I added some color and laid out the electronics Only to realize that the wiring would be much better in the foam
Which I again got carried away with and took a chunk out where I thought my receiver might go before checking the lengths.
Filling the gap and re-laminating over wasn't a big deal though. I placed the servos in front of the spar thinking that may help slightly with the extreme tail heaviness the plane seemed to have.
With the servos farther forward I wasn't sure if the supplied allthread would work so I decided to use my own control linkages.
In the middle of contemplating further setup, I threw up the old projector screen and setup my new chrome cast at the hopefully soon to be makerspace...
After a bit of over analysis, I finally decided on a mount for the ESC and fpv equipment.
That same friend, who has not finished his Specter, Invited me out to his farm to get some FPV flying in. I decided this would be a great time for a maiden flight but brought the Bixler just in case it didn't go so well. We thought a group shot / 'before' picture would be a good idea too.
For some unknown reason my mobius decided it dxid not want to cooperate, so we had to engineer a gopro mount. We did not have duct tape, bubblegum or bailing wire handy, but a bag of rubber bands did turn up.
I'm a bit apprehensive of the spinning blades after an incident with my tri-copter, but luckily Chase is a nice guy and helped me to get the bird in the air instead of flying himself.
Once in the air all was relatively good and I came back down in one piece.
After all of the tinkering we only had time for one more (16ish minute) flight to follow each other around. A few more tweaks and I think this will be a very fun plane!
