Thunder Tiger Tiger Bipe 40
Purchased: May 23, 2004 (from ebay)
This is a partially assembled ARF I bought in a moment of
weakness. Much of the assembly work was already done so it only took
me an evening or two to of work to get her ready to fly. She flies
like a dream - tons of fun. She is very aerobatic; quick, nimble, and
light to the touch, but has pretty long moments so is also stable. All
in all a very nice flier.
October 3, 2005
Sold to a nice guy in Georgia who will provide her a nice home. :-)
Here are a couple picts I took as I was packing it up.
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July 5, 2005
After flying this airplane once this year I became totally fed up with
it's tendency to nose over on landing. I had the day off today, so I
replaced the wire gear with an aluminum gear and moved the wheels an
inch foward. This should help the ground handling quite a bit and I
think everything looks nicer without that spindly wire gear.
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June 16, 2004
Posing with cowl and wheel pants and windshield.
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May 28, 2004
I was on a roll so I stayed up until about 1am last night to get this
mostly polished off. The muffler that came with the engine was goofy
(someone attemted to turn it into a tuned pipe) and one of the screws
was hopelessly bent so I think I will chuck it.
Turns out the muffler mount is exactly the same dimensions as an OS 40
FP down to the screws so I grabbed a muffler from a spare engine I had
laying around and that worked perfectly. Whew I didn't want to have
to wait around a couple weeks ordering something new.
I haven't put on the cowl the wheel pants, or the windscreen yet, those are
the only remaining things to do.
Here are some pictures at the field before the maiden flight:
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I gassed her up, adjusted the engine to be pretty rich since the
engine is relatively new and I wasn't sure if it was fully broken in
yet.
She flies really nice. Very nimble, kind of quick, but not overly
fast. It has a very light touch and the engine has more than enough
power. Half throttle loops are a breeze. It's lighter construction
than some of the other planes I have, so I backed off on the throttle
on the down directions so I wouldn't overload the airframe (but all
indications so far is that the airframe will hold up to whatever I
throw at it.) When you do cut the throttle and she eventually slows
down, she can be really gentle on the landings. That's something
where I need a bit of practice. :-) I always tend too high and too
fast. But it will be possible to do really nice three point landings
with this aircraft.
May 27, 2004
Posing in my living room ...
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May 23, 2004
I bought this aircraft brand new from Ebay. We were in Chicago for the
weekend so we did the pickup on the way back and fortunately it all
fit in the trunk since the car was full and we had picked up an extra
passenger on the way back. Much of the assembly work was already
done and the craftmanship was excellent. Here is a picture of the box:
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I was a bit surprised that the wings were so small, but I guess there
are two of them so they need to be smaller than the wing of a similar
monoplane.
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