Modifications

Experience from the prototype (which had now flown in excess of 1000Km) indicated several obvious improvements.

• The wing tubes are only supported in the EPP foam and eventually get loose. The solution is to embed liteply reenforcements drilled with 10mm holes into the wing.
• The winglets are attached with self tapping screws into plywood formers. This is neither robust or long lived. The improvement was initially to epoxy square 3mm nuts to the plywood formers and use 3mm nylon bolts to secure the winglets. A further improvement is now to use 3mm captive "T nuts" insetad of the square nuts which are less likely to come loose. The nylon bolts break in the event of a very bad landingand can be easily replaced, limiting damage.
• The motor mount was also secured with nylon bolts, although we found in Greenland that 4mm bolts were required (I had no problems, but somehow the students managed to get 'hot starts' with the folding prop blades crossed, the resulting excessive vibration pulling the motor loose).
• The wings and underside of the fuzelage was strengthened with fibreglass crossweave tape for strength and protection, and over covered with coloured tape for UV protection. I did some of this on the prototype (not part of the X8 kit but standard practice in the EPP combat community), but increased the amount and direction on the first two "production" models.
• The electronics was placed differently to create far more space for payload (below).

Boxed up

Packing was made for the original boxes, and they were reinforced externally with tape. Took longer than I'd have wished...

Worked well and both uav's arrived safely.

Ready to go!

The results of the final late night foam cutting and packing.