Flight trimming the Guillow's Lancer rubber powered airplane! 

Just some general rules of thumb for trimming outdoor rubber powered model airplanes. 1.) Weight is the enemy...only add weight to the nose or tail to get the center of gravity to where it's supposed to be, as shown on the plans...PERIOD! With a "cabin" model of this type, that is the only option. On other models with just mounting rails or a pylon, the whole shebang, wing and mount, can be slid fore or aft to attain balance and no additional weight is needed. 2.) Glide circle is adjusted by stab tilt. ( Looking from the rear, if you want a right turn, the right tip of the stab should be higher than the left.) (If the fin has a warp in it, causing unwanted turns, steam it out!) 3.) Glide trim is adjusted by packing up the rear of the stab and/or the front of the wing...sometimes both. 4.) Power trim is made with the nose block...almost all models require down and right thrust. If you've built the front of your model square, you might just as well add your first shim in the upper right hand corner of the model ( when looking from the front) as this will give you both directions at once. I suggest using thin (1/64 - 1/32) plywood for the front end shims... the rubber motor, at or near full winds can/will compress soft balsa shims. Josh's remarks regarding wing warps are right on...if power and gliding are to the right, the right main panel needs to have wash-in (trailing edge down) to prevent spiral dives. The tips need to have wash-out (leading edge down), in whatever the situation, to prevent tip-stalls. In good lift (and sometimes "rubber bunching") the airplane may tend to stall...with wash-out, the tips stall last making the plane stall straight ahead...without it, the wing will stall off in one direction or the other, dropping that tip, and it'll just dive into the ground. Said warps are best induced during the tissue drying stage of wing covering. For models this size, 1/16" warps should be adequate. Make sure your prop free-wheels during the glide...a locked up prop spoils the glide, the turn...EVERYTHING...as it acts like a brake and a forward rudder. I adjust every "locked up" model (non-movable control surfaces) in this order: Glide trim (while keeping an eye out for glide turn), power trim and then final glide turn. CHEERS!

Thanks for this video. I started building a Lancer when my son was 10 years old. He is now 40. I think that I will complete it this winter so that he and I, along with his 2 year old son, can fly it next summer.

One of my favorite plane as a kid..

Lovely cat.

thank you for a lovely trimming tutorial. I cannot wait to apply some of this knowledge to my latest build TONIGHT! :)

Thanks Josh, I have been following your videos for some time here in the UK and enjoy them very much. A lot of videos on line are short and lack detail, yours however are full of info and always a delight to watch, Keep up the good work 😊

Thank you for this video. It helps a lot. I'm new to rubber FF as a kid I could never get them to fly very well. Your trimming and telling us what your doing and why your doing it makes things very clear. Keep up the great work. God Bless

This was a very useful trimming video. Thanks

love free flight. It teaches so much.

No matter what Josh can make'em fly. If it reseables an airplane, can be hand tossed. Josh can and will put it in the air for time. Awesome!

I am glad I watched this before building my Lancer! Thank you!

I envy those still calm conditions. I have have been chasing calm conditions since I got into model aviation.

Maybe you should but that Cats motor in the plane. 😂 That sucker was running pretty dead on. 😂🤣👌🏼

thank you am still learning the basics

Omg in the mid 70's my brother and me built every Gillows plane short of the b-17. Somewhere in tbe middle of all those planes I down shimmed the prop button. It was our first real flight. It was crazy after that, everything flew we built. The Arrow flew away and we never saw it again. 48 years later we still fly RC planes together. I have a Lancer, Javlin and an Arrow rubber powered and thinking my grandsons need the bug lol.

Thank you Joshua: I learn a lot from you guys on every video. 🤙

Another great video but what caught my eye was your flight box. I am thinking of making something like it but can you share some wisdom of yours please.

wish i could be like you - still yet to make a balsa wood plane that flies

The cat loves the airplane. I have been building these cox020 powered for around 30 years, and chop the nose and include 6inches of flat centre wing with a leading edge trim shim as per plan. Love the videos.

Good video. Haven't built a Lancer yet. Enjoyed watching it fly.

Excellent! Thank you for posting.

I find that initial glide tests are challenging because we don't know the required speed. Too slow, dive into the ground and break something. Too fast, stall, dive into the ground and break something. I find that a right bank with a bit fast launch lets the initial turn absorb the excess speed while the sideslip will bring the wings level without a stall. This will also get the plane up high enough to get enough airtime to judge trim.

I built the guillows arrow (which I think is the sibling of the lancer) and it NEVER flew like that hahahah. Thank you for putting this up.

Nice flights

I just started the same plane, getting into free flight, at 64 years old,!

Wonderful and informative. I wish I'd known this stuff way back when... Thanks so much for this!

I hope you don’t mind me remarking like this but,,,,,,sir ,you have a wonderful understanding wife to let you and support you in your auro modeling .....mine was anything but lol xxxxxx

Your understanding of aerodynamics etc. is pretty damn impressive. Enjoy your videos

For a model that at first glance seems to have a lot of deficits, you were able to get it to fly rather nicely.

Really love these videos, lot of good information 😀 Would you suggest thickening of the airfoil profile to improve it? I’m building an RC version, and this video really helped me visualize it’s flight characteristics better

You sound like Kermit the Frog, but in a good way. Nice plane.

Very nice flights, Josh, (for a Lancer). 🙂👍 Good under power but they are notoriously poor gliders. I add a 6" center section to the wing to make it 30" wingspan. Big improvement but I guess the contest rules won't allow you to do that? BTW - the plans indicate a shim under the wing leading edge is required.

Nice flying site.

The weight man and what you need it to add more space take some wood out and lighten it up.

I built so many guillows planes as a kid. I wish they supplied good rubber with their kits. I feel like this would make the biggest difference. I loved building them but I don't think there's a chance of them flying with that blue rubber band that comes with them.

If the stab has a lifting airfoil (hard to tell whether it does or not from the pics), it will give nose-down tendancy, requiring seriously rear-ward CG and lots of finickyness in pitch stability. I would try a flat stab and see how CG and pitch issues work out.

very cool

I enjoy your channel.

Would you be willing to show us your flight box setup for winding the models up. That is very handy. Also I have been building models for many years and I have yet to see the setup you have made to stop the thermals. That would be awesome if you would go into detail on how it works and how you installed it. Thank you for your videos.

Holy cow is it good rubber that makes it fly for so long? I made the same exact one and trimmed it to perfection yet I get beautiful short 10 second flights. Im using the stock prop/rubber band and can only get so much tension before it snaps back.

1:36 OW LAWD HE COMIN

Very nice! Thanks

"Definitely flies like it's heavy and has a bad airfoil" Total agree. This thing needs 1/2" more chord and the airfoil needs to actually taper with the wingtips. I think it may be too high % camber too

vuela muy bien!!

I mean if your CG is on the trailing edge of an unswept wing, that it dives nose heavy is just weird science. I built and flew the heck out of my Lancer, I used a dime store coloured tissue in place of the stock Guillows tissue which made it lighter but much weaker, I would get ok glides but I always felt the wing was poorly designed.

Nice, Josh! If mine flies that well, I will be pleased. How much rubber are you using?

I built one in like 1970. Liked the Comet Cloud Buster much better.

This video could be called The Revenge of the Lancer. Every disparagement was countered by a pretty good flight. I've built free flight rubber craft since my childhood and the Lancer, although everything Josh said, especially being overweight, has the lines of a decent small model. If you can build a nice scale Guillows, trim it and make it fly well then you are a master modeler. The Lancer and its siblings aren't that much of a challenge. Question: for builders with experience with laser, die and print wood models, which do you prefer? I always liked print wood because I could get better fitting parts by iteration and didn't have burn marks. Die crunch was better for plywood because I had mediocre tools to deal with virgin ply. Love some other opinions.

Very nice flights. You should be pleased with your efforts. I think I will try one myself. Do you recall what the air was like that day?

nice

Where can I get a small button timer like that?

I think you could trim a brick to fly !!

when you say the airfoil is bad. can you explain why? im about to build this kit.. maybe i can improve the wing a bit

I built one of these as a kid (40 years ago?!?) and got it to fly maybe 10 seconds? So cool to watch you work your magic and make these fly so well! Do you have any video from when one of your dethermalizers fire? I've seen those talked about my entire life, but never seen what the airplane looks like once they fire and the rear stab flips up? Could a fixed wing UAV use this technique to land in a tight area?

how many strands and length of rubber?

Noice🔥

Should i buy this model i mean is it a good one?

Excellent videos you make Joshua! Can I ask how: do you make a hinge on the stab for adjusting it and fitting a DT? Cheers A

How thick are the shims, please? Many thanks :)

I have a question. were do you get those rubber bands from i cant find them anywhere? nice build Btw! keep it up!

Ek like die tarrentale se gesing 👍

Is 1/16 about the limit for the stab shim? If so would this apply to most planes?

Istimewa

Do you think you could get a guillows WWII model to fly?

I have to say; The rocket sound in the intro overstimulates my audio sensors but not in a pleasant way.

Josh, don't go so far from the camera!

What could be done to modify the stock ribs to improve the airfoil?

The more you ignore a cat the happier it gets

How and what needs to happen to improve the wing airfoil

I had one of these! Just not built as nice.

checkout my video of my trixter beam build. getting ready to start a bellanca cruisemaster!

when a pro comes to an internet building flight contest other's give up and push in their chips........

珍しい柄の猫だね。

Wood prop. Move CG back without adding weight. Minimum prop diameter is square root of wing area.

Guillows' airfoils have always been inexplicitly terrible. As a model airplane company, one might reasonably expect that this aspect of wing design would be of paramount interest to Guillows to get right. However, this is not and has neve been he case. For a rubber powered sailplane like the Lancer, a reasonably thick (that is, horizontally thicker not thicker balsa, and thicker than the kit airfoil), slightly but distinctly undercambered airfoil is probably the best choice.

Over optimum