Cleveland Albatross information wanted

[wahrhaftig]

I have recently purchased a 10 foot Cleveland Super Albatross kit. The plans and printwood are copywrite 1944.

Has anyone seen one of these? Built one? Flown one?
I would like more information about it.

Does anyone know a website that specializes in vintage sailplane models?

[Ollie]

It is very lightly built (fragile). If you tow launch it, do so very gently. It would be in its element in very light wind slope soaring.

If you wanted to beef it up you could face the fuselage formers on both sides with 1/64 ply and replace some of the thin stringers with small carbon fiber rods. Because the gluing area is so small with the thin formers and stringers, you might want to sew the stringers to the formers with kevlar thread. The wing spars could be replaced with tapered carbon fiber precured stock from CST or Aerospace Composite Products. Vertical grain balsa shear webs between the carbon spar caps would be the way to go. The weight gain would be welcome for normal slope soaring and for returning to the field after chasing a thermal downwind. The strength to weight ratio would be improved by a factor of at least ten. Pultruded carbon rods are about 100 times stronger than balsa for the same crossection and only about 8 times heavier for the same crossection.

[BMatthews]

I got the plans for that one from John Pond years ago. One look and I realized that it would never be built by me using the stock construction.

The shape is gorgeous but I'd plan on donating the kit of materials to a mueseum and just use the plans for the outlines. ALL the construction will need to be changed. The fuselage formers will work but you would need to plank the whole thing. The wings are...... are...... well, are just WRONG. I suspect more than one of the original free flight model versions collapsed just during test gliding.

If I was to do a version that I could fly these days I'd use a foam core with epoxy glass skin fuselage and built up balsa and spruce wings using our usual techniques. With the gull wings and low dihedral angles in any case this would be a good design to drop the dihedral down to classic full sized angles and use ailerons.

But by that time it might be just as easy to do a scale model.... and that's why my plans never got used. :D