1/2A Nobler & 1/2A Oriental - foam wings, profile

Looking good I'am not a foam head but enjoy watching others work it , Keep us tuned in Topbrent ,And welcome to the Forum! I must have missed your intro.   Getback

Yes, as getback said, WELCOME !!!!

Thanks guys! I am just getting back into flying after about a 17 year break. I flew as a teenager and then college and life took over. Now it's time to show my little kids how much fun this hobby can be! I recently built one of the coroplast ManWin trainer planes and we have had a ball flying that thing. They can really take a harsh beating.

The oriental and nobler are very simple, but should fly well enough for sport flying purposes. External controls for easy construction. I have some Corehouse Li'l Hacker planes to put together also. Gotta have an arsenal of planes at the ready.

topbrent wrote:Thanks guys!  I am just getting back into flying after about a 17 year break.  I flew as a teenager and then college and life took over.  Now it's time to show my little kids how much fun this hobby can be! ...

Sounds really familiar. The same path more of us than not took. Glad you got back into it.
Rusty

topbrent wrote:I have been busy with some fun summer projects.  I wanted to try a few finishing methods on foam wings, so I slapped together these two planes for that purpose.  These are still in the early rough stage, but these should be fun when finished.  The wings airfoil were roughed out of a 1" block of foam on a belt sander.

Nice job! The planes look really good.

topbrent wrote: Fairly crude, yes, but I don't have a hot-wire cutter and the foam was free.

If you decide you want a Hot Wite cutter, you can build a nice one for around $10.00 and use an old PC power supply to heat the wire.

I built two, a 48" bow and a 36" bow.
Here is a pic of the 48" bow.

The picture isn't the greatest but to give you an idea of what I did, I used a piece of scrap 1x2 and drilled a 1/4" hole at a 45 degree angle 48" apart on the 1" edge of the 1x2 and I then cut two 24" pieces of 1/4" solid steel round stock. To help keep the wire in place, I made a mark an 1/8" from the end of each piece of round stock and used my Dremel cut off wheel and made slots all the way around one end on each piece and then simply inserted them into the holes in the 1x2.
The bow now looks like this, \_____/  For the wire, I used some scrap Sullivan steel braided flying line. I wrapped a loop on one end of the line and used thread and ca to secure the loop. The loop fit inside the slot I Dremeled into the one end of the round stock and I wrapped the other end of the wire tightly until it pulled the round stock straight to look like this |____|. The tension of the round stock keeps the wire tight. Then I simply secured the end of the wire with thread and c.a.  Having someone to help hold the wire, helps make it easier to secure the wire.

My first bow was made from 1/2" PVC pipe using two 90's and two T's so the bow had |__| shape with a length of 1/2" pipe spanning the center of the bow for added strength when the wire was tightened. For the wire, I used the same as above but I drilled holes in the pipe on each end of the bow and used two 1/4-20 eyelets to make the wire tension adjustable. The PVC works okay but it has a tendency to flex.
To heat the wire, I used an old desktop PC power supply unit and I tapped into the 12v+ and negative leads using a long length of wire and I soldered on alligator clips to clamp to each end of the hot wire. I also soldered a DPDT switch to the power wires and zip tied them to the top of the bow to make it easier to turn on and off. Now for the templates, These are crude but they worked.

I made them out of Dollar Tree foam board and used aluminum ducting tape along the edges. The downfall is, those templates were only good for one use. I now make templates from either laser cut ply or counter top laminate.

You can see my first foam core wing here,

https://www.coxengineforum.com/t5005-la-stick-scratch-build-for-cox-pee-wee-020


Shawn