FITTING A TOW RELEASE, BY TREVOR HEWSON
I just spent a couple of hours fitting a tow release to my Radian Pro and thought I would share a few pics in case any other Radian owners are thinking about doing something similar. And of course, the basic approach can be adapted to any glider, motorised or not.
i) Rather than make a new aperture for the line, I opted to use the lower air intake. I used an offcut from a 2mm pushrod for the release pin. Piano wire will do, but it is harder to adjust the bends. this first picture shows the pin in the locked position.
ii) This picture shows the pin in the ‘release’ position. A piece of snake outer was used as a guide tube for the pushrod.
iii) The pushrod and snake run through the motor wiring tunnel, under the ESC mounting platform. The servo dropped into a convenient cutout in the foam, wedged in with a bit of 1/16in balsa and glued with UHU Por. As you can see by the marks on the wire, a lot of adjustment of the kinks and bends in the wire was needed to enable it to run smoothly through the snake without trying to lever the servo out of position. There’s no secret to this, just trial and error.
iv) Everything stowed back in. Note that the motor wires are now brought up over the ESC platform, alongside the ESC itself. I also had a lot of excess wire associated with the vario module to keep out of the way of the servo and pushrod.
v) The servo is still just visible with everything back in place.
Now I can sit back and wait for the first tug to be commissioned. Meanwhile, if anybody needs any help preparing a tug or glider for aerotowing, just shout.
Cheers,
Trevor
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