3696 Spitfire Project

You got a cool electric WWII combat rig? This is the place to show it off!

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tiger_musky
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3696 Spitfire Project

Post by tiger_musky »

I thought I would share with you my build-a-long of my Spitfire. This will most likely be my final scale combat plane with an elliptical wing. The cutting method that Petr documents in the workshop is pretty fool proof, but I’m going to have to lump it in the PITA category. The building format closely follows my Sea Fury project http://www.rccombat.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=12363. With that said here we go:

1.) I found great set of detailed cad files on the Internet and scaled the wingspan to 36â€
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Ed Kettler
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Post by Ed Kettler »

Outstanding! Great looking bird, and great article!
Alex Treneff
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Post by Alex Treneff »

Very nice looking planes! Bring them to the NATs and we can battle it out! [:D]
Rabbit Leader
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Post by Rabbit Leader »

Oh dude, that's looking sweet...[:D]
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boiler
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Post by boiler »

Once again someone has a plane with better workmanship than mine. Thanks for the look.
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o1moregil
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Post by o1moregil »

SSSWWWEEETTT!!!
tiger_musky
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Post by tiger_musky »

This next post is probably old news to a lot of people who are following this thread, but I thought I would revisit the method of building a cowl out of a pop bottle. There is a great article on how to do this in the workshop section so I will expand on this a little.

The supplies for this are very simple … wood plug, paper templates, and a 2-liter pop bottle. As far as the wood that I use, I try to find either pine or cedar. If I don’t have any laying around the house, I either go to lumber yard or home depot and pick through their garbage in the lumber section. This way I can get it for free or if I am really feeling crazy, I’ll breakdown and pay the $.50 from the cull bin. As far as pop bottles, I typically will take the dog for a walk on recycling day real early in the mourning. This way I can raid the neighbors recycling bin unannounced to them.

I start by blocking up the cowl using wood scraps. This plug was made from a pine 1x4 board. As far as the templates go, I usually scale up the side, top, back and front profiles 1/8â€
crash_out
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Post by crash_out »

Does balsa or a softer wood work for making the plug, or does it need to be a harder material?

Beautiful job on this, and the Seafury! Keep up the amazing work!
Lee Liddle
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Post by Lee Liddle »

Balsa will work, but is expensive compared to free wood. I even use blue foam for quick cowls, but you`ve got to be careful with the heat gun.
Lee Liddle
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Post by Lee Liddle »

BTW nice article and plane.
crash_out
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Post by crash_out »

Yeah, I tried the foam, and ended up with a very nice, siny, lump of plastic/foam hybrid...
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Post by Alex Treneff »

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by crash_out</i>
<br />Does balsa or a softer wood work for making the plug, or does it need to be a harder material?
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></font id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">Nick, Redwood is relatively easy to sand, yet won't melt into the plastic like foam will.
tiger_musky
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Post by tiger_musky »

Nick,

Home Depot and Lowes sell cedar battens for about $2.49 apiece. The dimension on these are about 1 1/2 square by 4 ft. long. The can be be cut, glued, and clamped almost anyway you want to get a wood block. The nice part about cedar is it can be carved with a carving knife and very quickly sanded to shape. If you look at me Sea Fury build, I carved the canopy from cedar and this went very quickly. Your local building supply box store should have these in stock because I was able to locate them in Georgia, Florida, Vancouver, WA and Minneapolis.

Lee, thanks for the compliment. What have you been building this winter? I haven't seen you post pics of your planes in a long time.
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