Big Apple Hobbies

Twin Radian

This was my first X2 airplane.

I made a new balsa elevator from scratch so that it would be solid enough to mount a camera on.

The center wing panel originally was just the 2 end pieces glued together, but since I hold the plane from the center section at launch, this proved to be far too floppy. I then filled the section with 7 lengths of carbon fiber and now it works great (and it's also strong enough to crack walnuts).

The stock connectors for the elevator and rudder are a little marginal so I replaced them with Great Planes 3870 which you can get from your local hobby shop or from Quantum Hobby (the link here). Normally I prefer DuBro parts, but their equivalent "Quick Connectors" are either round or hex shape, and therefore more tricky to hold with a cheap pair of pliers or some other improvised bit of fluff in the field. The GP unit with the square body is by far the easiest to grab hold of if you need to make an adjustment.

I made a long wing joiner tube by putting 2 stock Radian carbon rods together and filling their insides with as many smaller carbon fiber tubes and tubes as it took for them to jam in there together. Once the rods and tubes were jammed in place and did not move easily, I dumped about half a bottle of CA into each tube end and allowed it drip all the way down along the small tubes. It's much heavier than the original, but also much stronger, and was super-easy to make. The only tricky part is to make sure that the 2 rods stay aligned to each other when you start dripping the glue in there, otherwise you can end jp with a V-shaped tube.

I was originally worried about insufficient roll control and was prepared to put in differential thrust (mix rudder and throttle), but the plane flies super-sweet just as it is.

There are no electronics going from one plane to either other, instead the plane is (just like ChampChamp) 2 Radians flying very close formation. I place the rx's of both planes into bind mode at the same time, perform the binding procedure on a tx, and now both airplanes will respond as one. The great part is that you can switch from the TwinR version back to 2 separate Radians in about 15 minutes by simply replacing the big elevator with the stock one, and replacing the twin center wing panel and wing tube with a regular wing panel and wing tube.

The only pieces modified from stock are:

• wing tube,
• wing center panel,
• elevator and
• pushrod joiners.

The other mod videos are all listed HERE.