Converting the 30 Rubber Powered Dumas Piper J-4 to Electric RC – Part 3 During our last session in the shop I finished building the basic structural components…wing panels, fuselage and tail surfaces…of the Dumas Piper J-4. This time we are going to fill in all those remaining details like mounting the motor, ESC , […]
Converting the 30 Rubber Powered Dumas Piper J-4 to Electric RC – Part 2 Last time I finished up with just enough work done on the fuselage to permit me to show you a trial mounting of one wing panel on the modified cabin assembly and the new 1/16″ plywood wing carry-through spar I designed for […]
Converting the 30 Rubber Powered Dumas Piper J-4 to Electric RC – Part 1 Last time I finished up with the construction of the TF 100″ span Stinson SR-9 and explained that I’ll be waiting for happier weather before you get to see flight photos. Right now it’s time for something a lot smaller, but no […]
It’s time to finish putting this airplane together ! As I write this, my Stinson SR-9 is actually finished…built…ready to go. It has been “out in public” at a static model show at the Seattle Museum of Flight, but I have not yet had the airplane anywhere near a flying field. It’s November outside. […]
Building Those Old Kits – Not Enough Information? On lots of the plans sheets that came with those old (stick-and-tissue, printwood, rubber powered and maybe sort-of-flyable) model airplane kits pretty much all you got was plans. Instructions that actually helped you figure out what came next were not always part of the deal. For a […]
Now we get to one of those places where “doing scale” starts to get a higher weird factor. I can guarantee you that the many hours you may spend doing what I’ll describe this time will never make your model airplane fly better. What a well done stitch-and-tape job will do is guarantee that your […]
Before we get started on this month’s installment of our Building the Stinson story, I want to invite any and all of you who are reading my rcmodel.com blogs to participate in deciding where they will be going next. I have been working on the big Top Flite/Great Planes Stinson SR-9 for over two years, and as […]
Yes!!! It’s finally time to put some covering on the Stinson SR-9. When we’re dealing with a traditional “built-up” structure like this one (as opposed to a box structure made of sheet balsa or perhaps molded composite) you might say that all the work I’ve done so far has been leading up to this moment. […]
The Stinson SR-9 project is getting very close to the time for me to begin covering and finishing, but there are a few installation details to be completed before I will actually be ready for “closing up” the structure. In the case of this airplane that means putting on a fabric covering. For me this […]
The Stinson SR-9, like most high-wing single-engine monoplanes of the 1930’s, relies on external strut bracing to stay together in flight. The SR-9 uses a single, large strut under each wing rather than the multi-strut assemblies like the ones you’re familiar with on Pipers, Aeroncas, Taylorcrafts, and so on, and it uses a pair of […]