With less than 2 weeks to go before the British National Championships I was getting very worried the Viper would not arrive. Then at last the email I had been waiting for came, "Rob the Viper will be with you Wednesday"..... I felt like a school boy waiting for the delivery man all Wednesday morning and remember thinking my life must be rather sad to be getting this excited about a new toy aeroplane, especially

at my age but then this is not just any old toy aeroplane, it’s a toy that can go more than 200 MPH and I can race it too . After what seemed hours and hours the box finally arrived and I gasped as I saw a massive hole in the side of the box, I sat the delivery man down whilst I checked the contents but fortunately Stratair packs the model behind several layers of thick cardboard so whatever had made the large hole had only gone through one layer, so I sent the delivery guy off with a flee in his ear about the damage and then headed to the workshop.

In The Box.

The Fuselage comes with the motor plate already installed with a nice ring on the inside to help guide the motor home. The Neu Motor did not fit as it 0.5 mm thicker than Mega and Hacker and Stratair have been notified and will make future guides 0.5mm wider (they don’t use F5D Neu motors in Austria). I had to make up a little sand block to open mine up a bit which was a little annoying but no big deal.

The Tail plane screwed straight into place as did the wing so I was able to put her together for a few pictures within seconds. She also comes with Servo hatch covers for the wings and all horns pushrods, snake and even a multi plug for the wing. In other words as long as you have tools and servos ready you have everything you need to finish her off and as luck would have it I had it all ready to go.

The instructions are all in Austrian but the pictures are good enough to get an idea how they recommend it goes together. To be fair if you’re building one of these you should not need a blow by blow instruction book anyway as you have to be an experienced Pilot/modeller and a few pics should be all anyone needs.

I did not like the way they did the elevator in the pics as its the most important control function on the model and has to be completely slop free so rather than bring the snake up under the elevator I sanded off the sides of the snake and then made a little channel at the back of the fin so I could bring the pushrod further back giving better leverage thus less slop. I then made a little horn the same as on my Demon and very pleased with my efforts I am too.

I loved the way they mounted the servo on a ply plate in the middle and I had not thought of that before so that is the way I mounted my HS65 Digital servo which allowed me to push my receiver way back in the Fuz on the other side of the servo and the receiver battery then fits in front. The Fuz took about 1 hour of fiddling to get the servo and snake in and then it went into the airing cupboard to let the epoxy set good and hard.

The wing is just as quick to do as all it needs to be finished is the holes cutting in the servo recess and the middle for the servo wires. Once you open up the servo holes you notice they have even gone to the trouble off roughing up the surface on the other side of the wing so to give a nice surface to glue my SD150 servos too nice touch! I do not need hardly any down aileron so I set the servo arm at 55% back giving very little down movement but the maximum up so I can use up aileron for landings. Plus this configuration means the servo arm won’t stick out reducing drag. I found the horns that came with the model a bit on the large side so I cut them down to make them more streamlined and once glued on inline with the pushrod slots the final job is gluing the servo in.

I did not use the multi plug supplied by Stratair although I have used the same in the past but I discovered Ashlock connectors a few years ago and never looked back since as they are crimped rather than soldered so if you do have a disaster it’s a quick field repair rather than a solder job. Once the servo covers were fitted total time to build that bit was about 2 ½ hours.  

By Wednesday evening the model was basically ready to fly with a few final titivations left to do like making a small hole at the rear to allow my 2.4 aerials to poke out the back and air holes at the front to hopefully keep it all cool. So I decided to finish that in the morning and refer to Google to help me sort out what the Austrian is for CofG. In the instruction book it had an area that referred to Schwerpunkt : 55-60mm. Now that looked like the CofG but at 60mm that is 50% of the wing Ekkkk Surly that can’t be right but after Goggling the text I discovered that it was but still not happy I set it at 52mm back for the first flights which looked very rearward to me.

There is loads of room in the Fuz due to the long nose so setting the CofG is easy and what helps more is despite the fact I have the heavier Show version ready to fly the model comes out at around 900g without a receiver pack you can run a nice big pack and still have to add weight to get up to the minimum race weight of 1000g and now she is ready to go.

Typically the next 3 days brought gales and torrential rain so it was the Sunday Morning before I could get to the field for the maiden which seemed like weeks and gave me plenty of time to keep changing my mind which race set up to use in her. As I only now had 4 days left before I had to leave for the three day British Champs is became obvious I needed 1 model that was going to be reliable and I had flow well all year with the Demon powered by a Neu motor so it seemed silly to break up that team. This meant I could run the Viper with a Mega 16/25/2 in her which had gone great in the Demon in testing but was untested over a whole weekends racing.

Sunday morning the rain finally lifted and although still windy it was sunny and dry so after a few last checks Mark my caller threw her into the sky and she was off. I had to put in a bit of up trim and within 2 laps I was down to pylon height cruising round like I had flown it for years, I was getting a good pull at pylon 1 but it was clear she was nose heavy so the second flight I moved the CofG back to 57mm and then it all became a lot more lively.

The following week I got out and had around 8 more flights but the evening sun makes practice hard in the evenings as at some point you have to fly through the sun when its low so I limited the flying to some degree.

The First Race.

Day one of the Nationals and it was blowing a gale. A proper gale and you can see I am not making it up from the Video on this site. My pit man and my sensible side said fly the Demon as you know it very well however I have already become very happy with the Viper as it does everything I tell it too. Typically I am the first off in F5D and there is a good crowd watching so I decided that it’s going to be a do or die and take the Viper to the start line. She flew flawlessly and gave me the fastest time of the day and all bar .07 of a second the fastest of the weekend with a motor inside that cost £70 and is half the mass of the Hacker that beat me in the end.

The Viper has helped me be the first UK member to qualify for next year’s UK team and although I love the Demon I am currently saving up for 2 more Vipers 2 take to the USA with me. The only Question now is can Stratair make 1 in shocking pink and the other with a Union Jack on the wings like my 2007 fleet in Romania?

Final Good news.

The Demon is being imported by Overlander and it is Via Overlander that I got my hands on this model as a test. I love it; Paul loved it so now you can get the Viper from Overlander as well. The Price is currently under negotiation but if you want one get hold of them and I am sure they will chase up the price quicker

Hope to race you soon

Rob