I got a kit for the 2 meter klingberg wing while I was co-oping in Cincinnati for SDRC. I got it from someone off of Ebay. I didn't get around to starting it till Christmas. When I got home and started building I opened up the kit box and examined it for the first time. The first thing you'll notice is there really isn't much there. Just a few sheets of wing ribs and some miscellanous hardware and strip stock. And a few pieces of sheeting for the leading edge and such.

The first thing you do when building a Klingberg wing is make your wing jib. A nice fellow from NASA. Al Bowers gave me a set of different wing angles to use to alter the twist to convert the Klingberg wing into a Horten flying wing. So with a little trigonometry I made an altered wing jib out of the box cardboard to use. Getting the twist the same on both wings is extremely important for flying qualities.

I'm sure if you just follow the instructions for the Klingberg everything will go together pretty good. I made several modifications so I'm mainly going to discuss those here.

The first major change I made was to convert it to electric power. From the start I intended it to be an electric. I can't stand messing around with high starts and I don't live near a slope. I chose a leisure extended gear drive and 12x8 folding prop with a standard 05 motor. I used 7 1400 Mah cells. Durring flight tests this proved to be a little to much weight. If I had it to do over again I would make it pusher with twin geard speed 400's. I mounted my motor as a tractor drive. This puts the motor right in the middle of the wing spar so I built a cross over which also acted as a air scoop. This also required quite a weird battery mount. I had to split a 7 cell pack up into 3 2 cell sets and an odd cell lined up next to each other across the fuselage. It balanced properly this way and wouldn't fit any other that I could see.

The next major change I made was to mount my aileron servos out in the wingtips as opposed to using the sliding tray mixer shown on the plans. This worked really well. I just mounted my servo's at wing surface level and the extra drag they add sticking out probably increases the stability of the wing.

One other note about the ailerons. I followed Al Bowers advice and made the ailerons so that the whole wing tip moves. It cures much of the adverse yaw that is in the klingberg wing. But they brake off really easy to on even the slightest of rough landings so your better off just taping them on for flight.

Flying the wing is pretty straight forward. Because mine was rather weighty it required a really good handlaunch. The first few flight attemps did not have enough aileron throw and I could barely get it to turn. You need about twice as much aileron as shown on the plans and the instructions. After changing the throws I went out for the next test flight. This time it flew really well. But as luck would have it on the landing I made a huge pilot error and banked to hard for the final turn to land. Because flying wings have very little lateral resistance, if you bank to hard it just side slips out and stalls. Which is what happened and my wing folded in half and had to be repaired.

After that I repaired it as best I could and tried a few more flights. The glide ratio did not seem nearly as good. I don't think I got the wing aligned again properly. On my last attempt which was at the RAM electric fly in Seattle this fall the launch went bad and the wing spar cracked. So for now the wing remains on the shelf till I have time and money to get it aligned properly and install a lighter power system.