As my buddy Kelly and I worked yesterday on the latter stages of assembly, we came upon yet another issue with these birds. As he was assembling the linkages and connecting them up, he noticed that there was some slop in the movement of the ailerons. Here is what we found:
Above is the Aileron with the aileron centered and the servo holding the center position. I am applying very light pressure to maintain this position.
Here I am applying a small amount of opposite pressure. Again the servo is holding center position and the linkage has almost zero slop. All of this motion comes from the hinges sliding around in the pockets (I think inside the aileron versus the wing…)
In this case, both of the hinge points (I think that is what they are) on the inboard end of this wing panel seem to be completely unattached on the aileron end. I am rapidly becoming very disappointed with the quality issues on this airplane. This is my first FlightLine and Motion RC purchase and I’m not exactly encouraged to spend more money with them at this point. Still, I have had some issues with other manufacturers aircraft “out of the box”… and some of those have become my favorite planes. Often this is based on a combination of flight performance and support from the manufacturer so I will withhold any final judgement until I get some response from Motion RC and I have a few flights on the bird under my belt.
Hoping for better things…
I have purchased Motion RC’s 1700 P51, F18 Superhornet and P38. Th P51 had defective retracts that took them 5 months and 6 pairs of gear to get the plane in the air reliably. You can imagine how beat up the plane was after all those folding gear and having to belly the plane in with gear up. The F18 is ok but he P38 had a bad aileron servo. I was informed their police was to replace the $8 servo but I had to dig the servo out of the foam and replace it myself. After the P51 fiasco I certainly didn’t want to cobble up another brand model to get it to fly. I insisted they replace the servo or the outer wing panel. They sent me a recall ticket to send the whole model back, refunded my money and refused to sell me anything more. After years of excellent costumer service from companies like Horizon, It is a sad day for modelers when service goes out the window like this.