Prestige 3PK
1 – 2 – 3!!!
The new Prestige 3PK
our new F5J-airplane
Enhancements in a compact packing size
F5J has developed to be probably the most international class in radio controlled model airplane sports. Thus quite a few pilots face the urge of travelling long distances, mostly by airline to take part in competitions. Moreover even local pilots appreciate small package sizes to store and handle their airplanes at home, reducing the risk of hangar rash.
Additionally, to ship planes to our dealers is way easier in smaller boxes!
You can imagine, that the call from our customers was huge for a competitive aircraft with a compact packing size.
So here it is, we are happy to announce our new Prestige 3PK:
To manage a small package size, it was clear that we would break down the wing into four pieces and the fuselage into three pieces. Therefore it was preliminary necessary to find a good solution for a detachable tailboom.
The main focus thereby was to keep the diameter of the tailboom as small as possible, as this part of the aircraft is extremely draggy.
The diameter of the tailboom of our Prestige 2PK is exceptionally small and we wanted to keep this feature while designing the Prestige 3PK.
To ensure this, it is essential that the cross-section and surface area of the tailboom are not increased.
Quite a lot of F5J-airplanes have a detachable tailboom and have the servos placed inside the detachable part. As the negative influence of the boom surface area is not negligible even in F5J, we placed the servos underneath the wing and created a special attachment mechanism for the pushrods.
Just because it would not have been possible to place sufficiently strong and precise servos in such a small boom diameter.
By creating these features it became clear that designing the Prestige 3PK will not only become about dividing the centre panel and fuselage to simplify transport, but to implement quite a lot of small changes and enhancements that will improve the functionality and the flight characteristics as well as the user comfort.
The connection between the front part of the fuselage and the tailboom is realized by using a slide-on octagon-shape connector. This design offers practical positioning for securing the back part to the centre part of the fuselage. It is then screwed together tightly and easy to open again, if the plane needs to be dissembled.
Mounting the servos in the fuselage is very simple. The servos are mounted in a
servo board printed on a 3D printer. The servo board itself is fastened very
easy by using four screws in the fuselage centre section. The servo board is very easy to modify for different types of servos. This style of mounting the servos allows you to use very small servo arms, which has a positive effect on the resolution of the throws especially when using the v-tail version, where the entire servo travel can be used now.
Additionally the linkage-connection at the V-Tail surfaces is now realized using ball pins, which significantly improves the simplicity of connecting the tails to the fuselage. Furthermore the accuracy of the control is improved as well, especially when using crow brake while approaching for the landing!
On the cross-tail-version, the rudder linkage is connected using an “L-bent-wire”. This is easily attachable into a lever (rudder horn) which is glued into the rudder. This measure makes it way easier to connect and disconnect the rudder. By using a better lever arm proportion on the rudder horn, we also get a better resolution of the rudder throws on the cross-tail-version.
Connecting the servos is as quick and easy as the whole mounting of the fuselage.
The front and centre part of the fuselage are completely new. We have kept the arrangement of a slide-on-nosecone, so the front part can slide onto the centre part and can then be fixed using tape.
The cross section of the front part was changed to be more circular to allow the folding propellers to attach way better and thereby reduce aerodynamic drag.
We kept the possibility of shortening the nosecone by 90mm – the rear end of the nosecone is cylindrical and thus the CG of the aircraft can be easily adapted even when using different weight components.
The canopy hatch was enlarged to the former version to make it easier to slide in large battery packs.
The engine bulkhead has a diameter of only 30 mm now. Nevertheless it is still possible to mount the popular F5J engines from Xpower and Dualsky!
As the wing centre panel is now divided, we changed the location of the ballast tubes into the root chord of each centre panel. This makes ballasting way easıer and faster than before and the space in the fuselage can be used in a more “relaxed” way.
From a flight-mechanical viewpoint we changed the dihedral of the centre panel by using a centre joiner with one more degree of dihedral (increased to 6°).
This improves spiral stability and decreases the risk of tipstall while circling.
The V-tail fuselage is now extended by 92 mm in the tailboom. This longer tail moment arm increases pitch and yaw stability, but most of all spiral stability to match with the crosstail-version.
Our first test flights already prove these improvements and we are very happy with these enhancements.
To us it is obvious that the Prestige 3PK is another step forward and we are sure that it will make the Prestige 3PK a more comfortable plane to travel, handle and compete wıth.
We wish you a great start into the new flying season and lots of fun with your Prestige 3PK:
Your samba-Team & Philip Kolb
Fig.03: Minimum and Maximum AUW for F5J and GPS-Triangle Lightclass.
