...To make a long story short, I decided to change the directional throws on the V-tail and, of course, it responds correctly now!

The whole time, I was rolling the plane into the ground. I've never flown a V-tail before and just assumed you give them the same directional throws as ailerons! Your instructions say to make sure you have the correct direction, but they don't specify the direction.... My recommendation is that you specify the directional throws in the instructions to help clear this up for V-tail beginners (and even 10-year veterans that are new to V-tails). -) It would have saved me a lot of damage to a beautiful ship.

From : Don Stackhouse

Thanks for the feedback! Regarding your troubles getting the controls set up correctly on your V-tail Chrysalis HLG:

Well, actually, they ARE already specified in the instructions. Look at the last part of Step 54 on page 24. Don't feel bad, we've had one other question come in to "Ask Joe and Don" on this same issue. I guess that when there's a lot of text, it's easy to overlook something. Oddly enough, this is one thing that the beginners don't seem to have any trouble with. I guess it's all so new to them that they have no idea what to do, and so they read EVERY word. The more experienced builders tend to skim instead of reading, and end up missing little details like this.

On the 2-meter Chrysalis we took this into account and went graphical on almost everything. In the block that covers control setups, we have four rows of drawings, one each for up & down elevator and for left & right rudder. In each row there's a picture of the transmitter showing how the stick should move for that control, a drawing of a V-tail & another of a conventional tail showing how their control surfaces should move, and a drawing of the model showing how it will respond in flight. The rest of the instructions are similarly detailed, and all drawn on CAD, no photos. It's easier to read and to get printed clearly than the photos we used in the HLG version, but you wouldn't believe the amount of work it took to draw all of that! It represents many months of my time, takes up four 34" x 44" sheets, and the CAD files occupy about 10 MEGABYTES of my hard drive! Needless to say, I'm not too thrilled about designing any more built-up beginner's models for a while, I need a vacation from that kind of CAD work. If I don't manage to get away from the computer screen soon, I'm going to end up with square eyeballs!

Don Stackhouse
DJ Aerotech