What Is
The Edge 540?
Lifting the lid, and with the protective plastic
bags removed, I was looking at a little Edge 540
racer. The first thing I noticed was the superb job
Black Horse has done with the iron-on covering.
It also has a colour scheme that will stand out in
the air. The fuselage construction uses laser cut,
high quality balsa and plywood with extensive
lightning holes, while still retaining remarkable
strength. The plug-in, two piece wings are built
up from ply and balsa wood and are a thick symmetrical airfoil section at the fuselage, with a double taper out to small blended wing tips, adding
to slow speed stability. The built up tail group is
of a flat construction with pre-hinged and large
counterbalanced moving surfaces typical for this
type of aircraft. Access to the inside of the fuselage and battery shelf is through the removable
turtle deck canopy hatch which is fixed on with 2
tangs that slot in the F2 former and strong magnets hold down the rear. The construction like the
covering, is of very high standard and quality.
The big fibreglass cowl is very rigid despite its
light weight and the paint finish is superb with a
very good colour match to the covering colour.
Black Horse has done all the cowl cut outs for
you, which I just love. The hardware pack is quite
large and includes pushrods, control horns, quality spinner, nice wheels and powder coated main
landing gear. Black Horse has included a sticker
sheet and the good news is that the stickers are
pre-cut out so it is just a matter of peel and stick.
32
Airborne
On The Bench
As per the easy to follow, 20 page assembly
manual, I started on the wings and was pleasantly surprised to find Black Horse had glued the
CA hinges into the aileron surfaces, already saving quite a bit of assembly time. After this, I
tested that each surface had been glued in
properly. Better safe than sorry! The servo cutouts needed to be trimmed out to take my servos and 150mm servo extensions leads were
used to reach the centre of the fuselage. The
slots for the nylon control surface horns needed
to be cleaned out prior to gluing them in place
with medium CA and kicker. Last of all, the quick
connectors and pushrods were installed.
Landing Gear
The main landing gear is powder coated
alloy for a nice touch of class, and it bolts into
cut-outs on the lower section of the fuselage.
Another nice touch is the landing gear fairings
that once cut out and glued in place give a really
smooth line to the little Edge. The wheel pants
look very cool and wrap around the alloy landing
gear, but they are a pain to fit as the axle holes
need to be drilled, but not where they are
marked in the mould, and then you need to slot
the holes to get the wheels and fairing assemblies to fit. This is a bit fiddly, but if you take your
time it will work out OK. While working on the
bottom of the fuselage, I glued the hot air exhaust vent in place after I enlarged the opening
as much as possible.