manufacturer: Me span: 1430 mm weight: 15 oz

why
The giant kolibri was inspired by an article in the E-Zone. I wanted something like this but I didn't want to spend money on the micro equipment. Instead I decided to scale up the airframe until cheaper radio gear would be able to do the job. The sizes I've used are directly influenced by the size of the parts I was able to buy in the kite shop I went to.

In the picture above you can see the size of the thing. Hanging below it is my mugi which has a span of 80 cm. Below that is a 14 inch telly. This thing takes up a lot of room :)
I bought a stack of diferent tubes, rods and fittings and played with them until I found something that worked. The wing is 2 CF rods of 2mm diameter, with 2 brass ferules holding the two together. After a bit a of playing around I settled at 17 inches chord, which meant a span of 55 inches.

tail
The tails are 2mm carbon rod, glued to a triangle of balsa, which has been made from 2 sheets of thin balsa at 90 degrees to each other. The tails hinge in 2 clips which are clipped to the fuselage tube. I'm begining to understand why the e-zone plans for the kolibri have an extra piece of carbon for the hinge post on the tail. If you look at the way that mine works, all of the tail area is behind the hinge point. This means that the servo is having to do a LOT of work to move the tail. Now look at the e-zone plans and you can see that roughly as much of the tail is in front as it behind the hinge point. This will lessen the loads considerably. I'll try it like this and see what happens, the servos I'm using are pretty strong so I might get away with it ;-)

covering
The wing and tails are covered in ripstop nylon, also from the kite shop. To cover the wing and tails they were sprayed with spray glue on both sides and then laid onto an oversized bit of nylon. The nylon I'm using is VERY flourecent pink and green. It's so bright in fact that when I was covering it I came away with everything looking very green for a few minutes until my eyes had sorted themselves out.

wing mounts
The wing is clipped onto 2 posts, which are then clipped onto the fuselage. When it's not glued together, the whole thing is pretty floppy but I want to make it as crash-proof as possible so I'm only gluing bits together when they proove too loose.

radio mounting
It took me a while to figure out the best way to mount the servos. In the end I zip-tied them to 2 T pieces which were slid onto the fuselage tube. This seems to have worked really well and they're now very reluctant to move.

power
I'm undecided on the power system at the moment but I suspect I'll use a geared speed 280 and see how I go from there.

Well, the power system is now decided upon, it's getting a speed400 motor on an olympus 2.3:1 gearhox spinning an APC 10x5 e-prop. This setup is being used because it's what I had laying around and I'm too lazy/cheap to buy anything else L)

but will it fly?

Answers on a postcard (or email) please.......... I weighs about 17-18 ounces and has a vast amount of wing area so as long as the incidence is set about right I think it should get airborne. One thing thats becoming clear is that the 2mm carbon rods I'm using for the wings is too weak. The wing has a nasty habit of re-twisting itself into a very strange shape if it's moved suddenly. I may need to re-make the wing with 3 or 4 mm carbon rod in order to get the rigidity I need.