What's It all About ???

This page is all about the building and flying of radio controlled model aircraft. It's a highly diversified hobby that takes in as many skills as you like to use. Everything from electronics to carpentry, to painting, to drawing and designing with a little bit of metal work thrown in. Some builders even go into doing their own machining, pattern designing, fibre glassing, moulding and engine design. You can use electric motors, 2 stroke or 4 stroke internal combustion engines or even minature turbine (jet) engines for power. My own models use 2 and 4 stroke internal combustion engines and range in size from about a metre in wingspan to well over 3 metres from tip to tip!


Wednesday, February 27, 2013

A resurrected Lancaster build.


Over a year ago I started to build a 90 inch wingspan Lancaster and the build ended up going from disaster to disaster. First I lost almost all the build photos - then I found I'd screwed up the wing design. A word of explanation here - I started off with a very old plan that used foam wings and a ply/foam composite fuselage that used brown paper as a covering. I'm a difficult, grumpy old fart so that wasn't good enough for me!  I don't like using foam and I prefer to use conventional construction materials - I.E. Balsa and ply. SO -  I basically started with the full size out line that the plan provided and designed my own structure. Yeah - well - everything went OK until I decided I had to do a load test on the wing - of course I'd changed my mind half way through the construction and changed from a one piece wing to a fixed centre section with detachable out panels. Needless to say my bloody wing joiners failed and I destroyed the wing!! I did use a few strong words.

The part finished model then  hung on the wall at the back of the hangar while I thought about it and of course other projects came up and I mostly lost interest in the project. The 4 Saito 4 stroke motors I bought for the project just sat in their boxes - UNTIL  - I saw a 134 inch wingspan Lancaster  build thread on a Internet forum.  Now my model is only 90 inches but it did motivate me to get the bloody thing off the wall.

I took it down and promptly fell arse over head on top of it, that destroyed the remains of the wing and damaged the fuselage. I used a few very strong words. It also brought down the red fog and I vowed that no pile of balsa and ply was going to get the better of me. So I stripped the fuselage out - cut out the damage - and now I'm starting over again. So far I've replaced the fins and rudders which were broken off and repaired a thumb hole I put through the fuselage skin. I've started all over again with the wing and started to build a new revised centre section. This section will hold the inboard motors in their nacelles and the retracting under carriage. The outer panels will be detachable and hold the outer engines in their nacelles and of course the ailerons. I'm designing wing joiners using carbon fibre reinforced boxes and aluminium tubes.

A few photos of the early stages of the resurrection. The rebuild will continue on the Lancaster page as soon as I've done a bit more.



Knocked both fins and rudders off when I fell on the bloody model

Put my thumb through the skin as well


Luckily the fins and rudders were not damaged


Starting to build a new wing centre section - it will be bonded to the fuselage this time


Some reinforcing around the" thumb mark"


And a bit more work on the wing


This time I'm using dowels to reinforce the fin to stabiliser joins. I'll trim them off when the glue has cured.