Guillows sheetwood flying models - the Zip nocals.

[simpleflyer]

The new year has brought in some cold weather, but yesterday afternoon warmed enough to fly for a little while. So we took a flock of our favorite sheetwood no-cals for a flying session.



These were built from scratch using the Guillows ZIP glider format using 3-views of the aircraft modeled as building plans. The process is described on the first 2 pages of this thread.

Some pix of the models flown. The weather was pretty calm and overcast.

Navion


Stinson L-4


Douglas C-47


Fairchild C-119


And the Douglas C-118


A fine way to start a new year.

Al

[davidchoate]

maybe i'll make this today

[simpleflyer]

Looking forward to seeing your progress with the P-40. Will you be building it per the plan and flying it as a rubber powered FF. We built a 500 series P-40 a while back and our building and flying skills were not sufficient to get ti to fly very well as a FF model. However, our swing control profile P-40 flys well.

[davidchoate]

I',m gonna go for rubber FF

[simpleflyer]

After reading about Leland Snow, we decided to model some of his airplanes that he designed and built.

First we'll start with the Air Tractor 402B

A nice 3 view of the Air Tractors can be downloaded from the AT site:

http://www.airtractor.com/

Click on the URL and from the home page link to the individual model, once there, on the right of the page is link to a PDF file for that aircraft.

We took this 3-vu.



Working it over in MS paint we made up this sheet of AT-402B shapes.



One copy was printed to paper to make notes and develop a building plan, and another copy printed to cardstock to use a patterns for cutting balsa.



Our progress to date.

[simpleflyer]

Wing dihedral being formed for the AT-402B model.

.

[simpleflyer]

Made some more progress today. Wing complete except for gussets and fuselage slots cut.



A test fit of the parts.



Gluing doublers to fuselage and gussets to wing center section.



Close-up view of how the sliding removable wing is attached.



Ace will soon be ready for a test flight. Attaching a bit of tissue to the wing and tail and a few coats of thinned Elmers and a couple minor details and it will be ready to check out.

Al

[simpleflyer]

Looking thru our collection of domestic tissue remnants we found some that resembled Air Tractor yellow.



So we began applying tissue to the profile Air Tractor.

[simpleflyer]

A couple of coats of thinned white glue were applied to the vertical tail and top of the wing.



One of the wing panels was beginning to warp a bit. We tried pinning the panel to the building board while painting but a bit warping persisted. So we decided to give the Air Tractor a test flight. It was a bit breezy tor testing, but could be accomplished on a short line.



A few toss glides show that the AT wants to fly at relatively slow gliding speeds. At slow swing speeds it would try to fly but not as smoothly as one would expect. And in breezy conditions it became excessively loopy. So we slid the wing back in its mount and moved the line attachment point closer to the leading edge. This seemed to help the flight characteristics so some acceptable flights were accomplished.





The model was build with about 5 degrees incidence, this is a bit more than we usually use, so we may need to reduce this angle.

If one scrolls to the top of this page you can see the Guillows F6F mini-model that we built. They are very similar in that the Air Tractor was constructed in the fashion that the DC models were designed. That is the underside of the wing was left uncovered. It flys just as well without the under wing cover and is quicker and easier to accomplish. This scratch built Air Tractor was built at a fraction of the cost that the Guillows F6F kit cost.

[simpleflyer]

A few years ago(2011) we built ZIP nocal model of the F-100 and flew it as a swing control model. It does well as a 'swinger'. More about the construction of the F-100 and our early experiences with it may be found on the bottom of the page at.

http://balsamodels.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1646&start=15

With this model we developed a custom of trying to fly the F-100 in the company of its real world prototype. Our first such flight is shown at the above link, also.

This past March we had two opportunities to fly the F-100 along side of its real-world brother. One was in Galveston TX. There is one on static display next to the parking lot of the Lone Star Flight Museum at Scholes Field. The weather was chilly, cloudy, and windy, but Norma was able to snap a few pics of the event.





Our next chance was about a week later. Norma wanted to tour the local countryside to look at the Bluebonnets. So I mapped a route thru Bluebonnet country that would bring us by La Grange TX, very near to Fayette Regional Airport which just happens to have another F-100 on display. The weather was great although a bit breezy, but Norma was able to snap these pix.





The F-100 on display at the Fayette Regional Airport was a project by the local citizens to establish a memorial to remember the brave and capable USAF pilots that serve and protect our nation. The Thunderbird markings are in honor Rusty Keen, a local young man who joined the USAF and ultimately was selected to fly with the T-birds around 2005-2006. He flew the #2 position flying a F-16. The airport terminal has pictures and data about Major Keen including one of his T-bird team uniforms.




A mini-bio of Major Keen is at.

http://www.macdillthunderbolt.com/original_site/rightstory2_040805.htm

Enjoy,

Al

[simpleflyer]

Our latest ZIP model is of the T-38. One day at work, one of these flew into the FBO where we were working on the line crew.



The pilot was trying to get into Ellington Field and couldn't get in, so he elected to land at the airport where we were working, not far from his home base. The next day NASA sent over a van with an airstart and and fired up the plane and he continued on his way. We shall use some of the NASA markings on our ZIP model.

Building the T-38 follows our routine ZIP model building process. First we find 3-vu or plan of the subject aircraft. This time a plan by Ivan Munninghoff in Model Airplane News magazine.



We arrange the shapes of the main aircraft shapes on a page sized image using MS Paint. This is printed to a sheet of cardstock which is cut up to make patterns which are used for cutting the balsa parts.

[simpleflyer]

Using the card templates as a cutting guide, the parts are cut, and gluing begins.



Control surfaces and canopy are inked in. Since most of the structure is 1/32 sheet, doublers are glued to the nose and rear fuselage.



The wing and horizontal tail are glued in place.



The ZIP T-38 almost ready to fly.

[simpleflyer]

Test flights were not very satisfactory. My gut feeling was that more wing area needed to be added forward of the CG and dihedral would be useful. So the wing was flipped and a bit of dihedral added.



The adjustments alter the look of the T-38 a bit.



But it flys much better now.

[simpleflyer]

Our next attempt to convert a Guillows shelf model into a 'swinger' will be the DC series B-29.



We scanned the plan sheet and the wing and tail surfaces and edited the image to work up a plan sheet on which we can begin to work out our mods.

[simpleflyer]

A bunch of household chores and a short vacation trip to Louisiana to visit family and friends interrupted the B-29 build. It was nice to visit family and friends, but now we are able to return to our building board. On the trip to Louisiana we were able to make a quick trip to the 2nd AF museum at Barksdale AFB and visit the B-29 on display there.


Now back to the Guillows shelf model of the B-29. The model was an attempt to provide an inexpensive quick and easy to build a sorta scale model for beginning modelers. They used a minimum of die cut pieces of wood and used some building shortcuts to speed up the assembly time. Here are the parts for the basic structure of the aircraft.



We start by locating the main fuselage formers and cutting the wing slots.