Seeing the early DLG aircraft in late 2002 a group of local modellers based in Surrey England decided that this was the thing for us, it did not take long to find out about the Yahoo SALglider community and from then onwards we headed into first problem, sourcing materials !.

The United Kingdom is a relatively small land mass with a population of around 58 million it is generally understood to support an economy around 20% of the size of the USA, as a result the industries that would provide the initial source of our materials Aerospace and Aviation do not seem to have the scale that enables things like Uni-axial carbon and 0.75oz Kevlar to filter down to the retail market. For this reason most of the materials that we can find through either industrial supply or the specialised model outlets are very inconsistent in supply and often only available in small amounts. To make the job easier for those following us on I am providing a materials page here to help you start tracking parts down .

Our first model the Spectre leans heavily on the designs and techniques offered by Mark Drela, the two prototypes flown by Terry Adams and Simon Wittick has had a good first season taking some first five positions at several BARCS events during 2003.

After attending an F3K try-out event held in Essex we immediately took a liking to the event format and decided that this would set the path forwards

Spectre 2K4--the model evolves

An intensive review of the European F3K scene revealed the case for a model capable of holding a fair amount of ballast, and the ability of the new design to accommodate a range of wing planform and sections, construction techniques were to be vacuum bagging for wings and epoxy moulds for the fuz, early experience with the Spectre shows that  tail boom flex was an issue so we also decided to attempt manufacture of booms so as to enable a range of lengths and stiffness to be evaluated. Fortunately we found booms are one of the easier components to manufacture so again we decided to pass this on to others.

Looking around at the competition we had noticed a general lack of durability an example is the fuz stiffness and strength of the Highlite (Enigma) plus our own experiences where two Spectres were literally throw to pieces during the rigours of a 15 minute "Glider Poker"  F3K round, running repairs were carried out and went on to finish first and second.

In an effort to make the new model as stiff and light as possible a new DLG concept was born, the idea is simple in concept but perhaps a little more difficult to build. We decided that the fuz pod would be a non-load bearing shell that locates over a horizontal "crutch" that is intimately bonded to the tail boom this way all of the G force from the launch is transferred from the wing to a two screw pylon fitting to the boom / crutch interface, the crutch is to be a Carbon / Kevlar  shear web with cut-outs for the servos and RC components, a decision was made that we would all use the same radio gear for this range of model.

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