Thanks to all of you who replied and affirmed my suspicions that I had received a defective fuse. I'm happy to report that the manufacturer and distributor agreed with our diagnosis and will be replacing the entire sailplane.
I know it's not common to praise vendors in this forum but I'll buck the trend. The plane in question was an Eraser Xtreme purchased from Icare (http://www.icare-rc.com/). Etienne at Icare has been extremely courteous and professional in handling this incident and along with the manufacturer very quickly confirmed the defect and agreed to replace the airplane. This type of service is exemplary and worthy of support. I know Etienne can count on me next time I'm looking to buy a quality molded sailplane. For those of you not familiar with the Xtreme, it is a lightened version of the Eraser F3J sailplane (63-65 oz). The manufacturer, Lubos Pazderka, won the 2001 European F3J championship flying the Xtreme. Skip Miller has been campaigning the Xtreme in the US and won the 2002 SWC against some of the biggest names in the TD game. Luis -----Original Message----- From: Luis Bustamante [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Saturday, June 15, 2002 3:47 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: F3J Fuselage snapped The other day while launching my new molded sailplane the fuselage snapped in two. I won't mention any names at this time but the plane is a well known variation of an European F3J sailplane. This particular variation has won well known international contests in Europe as well as recently winning a large US TD contest against the best sailplanes available. My sailplane was quite new with maybe 30 launches so far. It had not yet been used in competition, had never had anything but soft landings and had not been crashed. It was still being trimmed out for launch and landings. The day the fuselage snapped it was being launched using one of our club winches which nobody would describe as "powerful". For those of you that fly ESL contests I would say our club winch has about 80% of the power of a typical ESL winch. Other planes flying with me included a Mantis, a molded Condor, an Addiction, an obechi Sleger's Storm, a Predator and even an old 2-meter Alcyon. None of these planes had any problems that day. This particular launch was my second of the day. At the top of the arc, before coming of the hook, the fuselage snapped about 8 inches behind the wing saddle. The plane crashed and seriously damaged the wing skins. The wing spar survived with no signs of damage. Obviously, the wing was strong enough to handle the launch. I have personally never seen a fuselage fail in this way before. On the many occasions when I've seen a winch blow up a plane, it was the wing spar that failed. This makes sense to me since the wing is experiencing a tremendous load during launch. I would expect the fuselage to hold up to the conditions that failed mine. What do you guys think of such a failure. Is it, in your opinion, an indication of a defective fuselage? Or is it an indication of a weak fuselage design? I would appreciate your feedback since I need to make a decision on how to proceed from here. I believe a lot of people out there are flying the same sailplane and maybe they should know about the possibility of this type of failure. Thanks, Luis RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
