I don't know what caused me to do it, but I suddenly decided that I too could scratch build a plane of my own design. Starting at around 3:00 this afternoon and just now finishing at 1:00 am means that I spent an average of just over three hours each on research and development, design, and construction. I'm glad she won't be carrying a crew on her maiden flight.

I tried to take the best of the planes I love and eliminate the things about those planes I am not so fond of. Hopefully, the "improvements" will turn out to be just that. She has the dimensions of the large trainers I love to putt around the sky with, but I attempted to design out as much excess weight as I could. Either performance will be much improved or else I just built a giant powered kite. Wing span is 63" and wing loading is under 9 oz per foot!

Construction is all coroplast and zip ties with a couple of arrow shafts for tail booms. I designed a one piece fuse/motor mount/wing mount that may be usefull in the future even if this ugly bird doesn't survive tommorrow. I am waiting until tommorrow to post pics as I want to either show wreckage or a tested design.

Right now I am just too excited to sleep. I can't wait until the morning to take her out and find out if I suffer from delusions of grandeur or if maybe I have learned something from building other people's designs all my life. There is an old saying about authors, "Good writers borrow, but great writers steal." I hope that I have stolen the best parts of my favorite planes.

Until the morning,

Barto

What the heck, you prolly built it out of stuff you had lying around, so there's not much to lose. I have scratch built one plane so far, and with a few mods, it flies fairly well. No matter how it turns out, it's still fun to build them any way. Good luck!!---Rob