Sunday, July 24, 2011

Quest AS-1 Escort Build Part 1 Parts

I bought this one on Ebay.
I'd read about a build by JeffyJeep on YORF and there was problems. I was interested to see if I got one of the older kits. I understand corrections have been made.


It's a Shrox design and looks like a downscale of the Dynastar Firefox SHX HERE. Shrox designs are always a fun build.

The model is much smaller than I thought it would be. The face card shows the first discrepancy. While the advertised height is 17.3" tall, my finished model is only 13 3/4" long! Unless I made a big mistake in gluing, something is really wrong.
My kit was dated 8/26/2010. I checked a newer bagged kit dated 6/3/2011. All three body tubes were the same length in both old and new bagged kits. There is no way this all adds up to 17.3" tall.

Here’s the pieces of interest.
There’s a reverse bend in the motor hook, it should curve the other way, an easy fix. If a new builder installed it as shown, you could lose the engine at ejection. The bend on the forward end of the hook is very small.

The yellow motor mount tube is flimsey and the exposed end will have to be strengthened.

The gap caps should have been printed on a thicker stock. It'd be a good idea to laminate them with something like cereal box carboard. For the purpose of this review, I'll build it stock.

The fins are laser cut from some pretty good balsa stock.
At the upper left, Note the corner of the tail fins. It is off the balsa sheet.
On the lower right are the “Wing Fins 2". There is no laser cut down the middle to separate this into two triangles. It’s another easy fix, but should have been taken care of when the balsa was cut.

Get ready - This is going to be a bumpy ride!

6 comments:

  1. Wild guess but maybe the numbers got transposed. 17.3 was supposed to be 13.7?

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  2. Hi Jeff,
    That could very well be the case!
    Still, a pretty big mistake.

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  3. How did you handle the issue of MMT sticking out of intake tube? if i use the 4" from the instructions i end up with .25" of motor hanging out, not the .5" of MMT i see in the pic. on package ond in instructions. -CT

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  4. Hi CT,
    I'll have to answer this when I get back home after next Sunday. Sorry, I'm on a cruise ship - I don't have the instructions with me right now.
    Check back next week and I'll figure it out when I can get the model and instructions in my hand! There was mistakes in the instructions.

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  5. Hi CT,
    I'm home and have both the finished Escort and the instructions in front of me.
    On my model, I simply adjusted the measurement length out the back of the intake tube so it was sticking out by 1/2". I "overrode" the instructions, so to speak. I still had enough room for the gap cap in Step 12.
    Good luck on this one, I've covered several of the "gotchas" throughout the blog posts.

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  6. I thought about this one again, it's been awhile since I did the build.
    Keep in mind if you simply move the MMT tube forward so 1/4" sticks out the back. That might leave you with 1/4" less area for the parachute in the forward offset tube. The open area for the 14" parachute is small.

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