Groove Freestyle

The latest ARTF from WestonUK is the Groove Freestyle, a 3D aerobat.  The build quality lives up to previous planes from the Weston crowd, and it is very well finished, although I found that most of the covering trim needed ironing around the edges.  The majority of the build is very simple (especially with the wing arriving in one piece - no Epoxying wing halves together here), the trickiest bit surely being the elevator closed loop.  I opted out of this and went for a rear-mounted elevator servo, in this case a Futaba 3010.  Rudder is on closed loop. Another tricky part I found was shaping the throttle pushrod to fit around the tank. One modification we have made to our Guernsey Grooves is to brace the tail plane, with carbon rods on one, and a very overkill-looking pushrod/linkage/clamp setup on the other (this one). For power I chose an Irvine 53, with a Weston Genesis pipe. This combo provides plenty of punch for pulling out of a hover.  All up weight is somewhere around 5 pounds, with the CG set at 175mm from the leading edge (the rearmost point advised in the instructions.

As you can see, it looks the part, and it flies really well too, considering it's size.  I've still only had a few flights with it and the motor is still running in, but as the summer comes, I hope to get a lot more flights on it.