I'm finally ready to offer short kits of my 35" WS Beech Staggerwing for sale.

For complete sales information, go here:http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showt...51#post3897913

Nick

Wow, thats pretty! You should cover it in transparent....

I have thought of covering one side in doculam, leaving it clear. It would make a good sales tool. Close up, I'm not that sure my craftmanship is really up to it though. I always manage to leave lots of skin glued here and there. This one is covered in red Solite. Perhaps I'll build a third one.

Nick

Excellent model. While I'm no expert on these I have long admired the shape and your model appears very faithful to the original. How did you develop the scale outlines, what souce did you use?

Greg,

I started out with a 17" WS Dumas kit. I started with the fuselage. I left the formers in their sheets and scanned them to get the basic shapes. I also scanned the plan's side view to get the basic former locations and side profile. Next, in my CAD system, I enlarged the design to 35" wingspan. Using the 3-view provided with the plans, I adjusted the shape to make it 'look' more scale. It took a significant amount of stretching to get a scale length. Then came some adjustments of structure to fit locations of the wing's LE & TE and other features.

About this time, I started a 'design & build' thread in the parkflyer forum. Martin Hunter then sent me a very nice set of graphic files: 14 pages of scale drawings in jpg form of various models of the Staggerwing. Using these drawings as references, I made more adjustments to the fuselage shape. I imported some of the jpg files into my CAD system and traced wing tip shapes, H-Stab shapes, etc. Then I scaled these drawings and added typical model structure details.

Next, I cut balsa and built the left side of the fuselage. With this half fuselage I was able to work out some more small shape/cross section changes to make the shape 'flow' better. After making some small changes to the left half fuselage, I cut the formers for the right half of the fuselage. The left and right sides of the fuselage were not exactly the same, but I felt they were close enough to fly OK.

Next came the wings. I used the scale drawings Martin sent be to work out the wing outlines, aileron, and flap sizes. Other than the landing gear arrangement, the wings were fairly straight forward.

As I completed the first prototype, I made small changes to the design so the next version would be better.

You can see the full development of the design by going to part one of the design / build thread here in Parkflyers: http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=229942

My scale goal was to make it look close enough to the real thing to require a ruler and/or a fair amount of knowledge of the full scale to tell the difference. I can still easily see some differences, but that's after over a year of work and studying the drawings.

Nick

Just a reminder before the end of the building season.

I have 3 kits available for immediate delivery: $120 plus $15 shipping to the cont. 48.

These will probably be the last Staggerwing kits I put together. So if you want one, don't wait.

Nick