Took the Goldberg Staudacher to the field today after its rebuild for the re-maiden. My friend, and IMAC competitor, Brian flew it for me to trim it out. It flew well, the new K&B .61 performed flawlessly(thank you Mr. Clarence Lee for the PDP job!). A couple of minor details to fix (needs more rudder and slight lateral imbalance detected).

All in all, very pleased!

Looks like we'll have a couple more Indian Summer days...so I'm taking advantage of it to do some painting.

The silver cowl is for my friend Brian Hannah's 40% Dalton. I'm reshooting it with silver and clear coat because the last paint job didn't stick well. Now we're using automotive paints exclusively.

The Kadet senior is getting Certified Coatings Butyrate Dope from Aircraft Spruce, sprayed over the Nitrate dope that I used to stick down the silkspan & dope. Sanding between coats on the wing and getting ready to spray the fuselage and tail feathers. Once everything is white, I'll add some red starbursts on the wing and red darts on the tail feathers for some contrast. Then I'll shoot a clear coat over everything to make it "pop"!

Looks like it'll be spring before I fly the Kadet, but that's OK.

Mark

I am finished with the electric to glow conversion on the RYAN STA EP. Ran the engine today, got it all dialed in. Purrs like a kitten at idle and sounds great at the top end. No problems at all with the inverted engine setup, I was careful to locate the fuel tank properly so no siphon effects are present. Radio system & controls checked out fine.

Now it'll go on the wall awaiting a nice day to see if the OS 10FP is enough to get it in the air!

Mark

I decided to convert the Ryan STA EP I built earlier this year to glow power. It had an old brushed 600 motor w/ NiCD battery pack and ESC and I wasn't really confident it would have flown the plane very well. The plane weighed in at the upper limit of the recommended weight. Instead of investing money in a brushless motor setup, new ESC and lipos / lipo charger, it was just easier to convert it to glow since I had the OS Max 10 FP motor on the shelf.

In the end, the plane lost over 8 oz (half a pound!) even with the 6 oz of lead weight it needed in the nose to balance.

I built the firewall from scratch out of 1/4" plywood, and figured I'd need weight in the nose anyway so I built it STRONG! Added the servo tray for the throttle servo and had to buy a 2 oz fuel tank. Then just carefully cut the cowl openings for the carb, needle valves, muffler, etc.

Can't wait to see how it flies!! With the 10FP, it probably will fly more scale-like but if I need to go faster I have a Fox .15 that would add a little ooooomph!

The Kadet senior is now covered and ready for paint. I covered the fuse and tail feathers with SIG "SG" weight silkspan. The wing is covered with a fabric-over-silkspan technique. Instead of using silk, I found several packages of old SIG nylon fabric in a box of stuff I bought and applied that over the silkspan. Applied wet and attached with nitrate dope, it worked pretty well! I don't think I'll bother filling in the weave, I like the looks of it on this classic airframe.

It'll get butyrate dope applied once the weather warms up enough to paint again using a paint gun...

This has been a fun build; I've learned a lot. I hope it's as fun to fly!!