Fleaman, or (The Unexpected Delight of Tinyness)

[Tophe]

Lovely little thing in your hand. I will never kill/break anymore insects-like things/beings making noise around me in the night: maybe they are such nice airplanes flying around

[KiwiZac]

Tophe! Never harm a Flying Flea...normal ones, you may terminate with extreme prejudice!

Thanks folks, I think part of my (out-of-proportion) disappointment is that I seemed to have underestimated my skill, and that I hadn't actually encountered any problems while building the kit so it was very enjoyable up until The Incident. I'll go through the swept-up dust etc again later this week, and Sam offered to look as well.

In the meantime I've done all I can.........except for the seatbelts! Although I will do the decals - limited to a design on the rudder and the registration on the fuselage. A friend suggested using part of the fret to cut out a new firewall part, which isn't a bad idea, and I may try stretched sprue for the mounts. The engine.....

Anyway, this shot of an active HM.14 in Europe shows the part/s missing - I've drawn red lines to them. Rather crucial, I'd say! The tiny propeller is safe, though.

[Mossie]

One way of reclaiming small parts is to chop the foot off an old pair of tights and secure it tightly over the end of a vacuum cleaner tube.  Turn it on at the lowest power setting and go over the floor in a methodical pattern.  The offending piece should be sucked onto the tights without disappearing up the tube, all going well.

[zenrat]

When you find the dropped part you are going to rig it I hope...

[KiwiZac]

I am definitely going to rig it!

[JayBee]

It is the front wing that pivots, and this is part of the problem that caused the terminal dives.
The other part was that the original plans were not exact about the relative positions of the two wings. If they were rigged wrongly, then when the stick was pulled back to increase the angle of attack of the front wing and consequently it's lift, what happened was the gap between the two wings was decreased enough to cause an increase of airflow over the upper surface of the rear wing and increase it's lift, and a dive resulted.
As the reason for the dive in this situation was not fully understood at the time, any unsuspecting pilot pulling back on the stick and getting a dive would pull even harder on the stick and so the problem is made worse.
Almost all the Flea crashes that are attributable to this phenomenon happened when the aircraft was at a low altitude, such as coming in to land, so there was no time to take any corrective action the result being "an inadvertent airframe/ground interfacing with associated structural disoptimising" (= crash).
Once the problem was understood it was easy to rectify and Fleas fliy safely to-day.

[KiwiZac]

Stick only - back and forward for front wing/pitch, left and right for the rudder/yaw/roll. Your feet just sit under the engine minding their own business.

Some builders also made a moving rear wing - one of the two preserved 1930s airframe in New Zealand has this - but common practice now seems to be a fixed rear wing, mounted further back on the fuselage.

[KiwiZac]

I don't think so - unfortunately the only two photos I can find are from the same side, I'd expect to see control rods either side if it was. This one was built in 1988 so I daresay it has the gap rather than a pivoting rear wing.

Kiwi Flea ZM-AAC has the pivoting rear wing:

[Flyer]

It is the front wing that pivots, and this is part of the problem that caused the terminal dives.
The other part was that the original plans were not exact about the relative positions of the two wings. If they were rigged wrongly, then when the stick was pulled back to increase the angle of attack of the front wing and consequently it's lift, what happened was the gap between the two wings was decreased enough to cause an increase of airflow over the upper surface of the rear wing and increase it's lift, and a dive resulted.
As the reason for the dive in this situation was not fully understood at the time, any unsuspecting pilot pulling back on the stick and getting a dive would pull even harder on the stick and so the problem is made worse.

So if both wings were fixed and the rear wing had a full span elevator instead, it would theoretically be immune to that problem?

"an inadvertent airframe/ground interfacing with associated structural disoptimising"

I missed that first time I read the post, I like it.

[zenrat]

...Kiwi Flea ZM-AAC has the pivoting rear wing:

And a Scott engine.  I did not know they built aero engines but wikipedia says "between 1935 and 1938 the factory at Shipley in Yorkshire produced the B2592 air-cooled Aero engine, based on the Scott Flying Squirrel motorcycle unit.  A 25 hp (19 kW) version was also specifically developed to power the notoriously dangerous Flying Flea aircraft.".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Flying_Squirrel
The notoriously dangerous comment references this article.