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The Great Planes 2M Spirit has been a popular beginners RC Glider now for almost 10 years. With probably thousands of these planes built and flown there have no doubt been a large number of columns and reviews so we thought that we would add to that with some building and flying pictures of our own !!
My 2M Spirit ready to go after a near fatal first winch launch !! There are going to be two more Spirits cruising the skies pretty soon. Some how Matt and I have both ended up with second hand Spirits, one partially built and the other ready to fly. Both have been built from identical kits so it will be interesting to compare the final results. We intend to winch or high start the planes so special attention has been focused on making the wing joiner and central spar box area as strong as possible ....they break if you don't do this, believe me mine did on its first winch launch !! After flying the 2M Spirit for a few months I would have to say that it is only an 'average' performer. It has a couple of design flaws that tend to cause it to wobble around the sky and also to tip stall a little to easily given the 2M span. The good news is that both these issues can be sorted out rather easily. The 'wobble' is caused by a smaller than required tail area. This combined with a rather short fuselage length results in a lack of 'yaw' power especially at lower speeds ... A well documented fix for this is to increase the tail area to 1.5 times its current size. The tip stall issue can be fixed by simply sheeting the outside wing tips along the leading edges. The plans call for sheeting up to the first dihedral break but adding additional sheeting all the way to the wing tip improves the air flow and helps to remove any tip stall tendencies. I have not yet made these changes but one site that does have some tips on improving the Spirit is the Charles River Soaring Site
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