During the last construction session I assembled formers F-3 through F-8 and built up the basic box structure that forms the bottom of the fuselage. During that entire assembly sequence the fuselage assembly was fastened to the building board with plenty of heavy-duty pins. When the last of the bottom stringers was in place I […]
In order to provide the most useful evaluation of this kit for those of you who are reading this, I’m following the construction steps in exactly the order they are presented in the instruction manual. The book says, build the tail surfaces first, then the wing panels and finally the fuselage, so that’s exactly what […]
It’s been a while since I have done any work that counts on this airplane…in fact, I have to confess that I’ve been letting it gather dust in my shop for about a year. I set the Stinson aside to work on the old FlyLine Great Lakes Trainer kit. That project turned into a twenty-nine-installment […]
It’s time to get back to work on the big Stinson! Last time I left off with the structure of the left wing completed (minus the flap and aileron), ready for sanding. I chose to get the FlyLine Great Lakes trainer project finished, so I let the Stinson gather a little dust. Now the new […]
Let’s go fly this thing! I’ve added a few more details since the last session in the shop, but I’m going to show them to you as part of the flight report on the completed model.
This one was worth waiting for. A couple of weeks ago my good friend Gary Ritchie, who does all the flight photography you see here, called me and suggested that the weather was about as good as it would ever get at this time of year and did I want to go flying? As it […]
All that’s left before flight testing is rigging. In this case that means both rigging the functional controls…hooking the servos to the surfaces…and making up the wing and tail brace wire groups. Let’s look at the servos first. I used Sullivan Gold-N-Rod splined nylon flexible concentric tube connectors (S-504) for the connections between the rudder […]
(NOTE: This is the revised introduction I added to this blog entry after it was used as the source of the FLY RC Magazine article based on my original blog content.) A while back I presented a two part article here in Fly RC explaining how I scaled out the big (1/6 scale) WACO SRE ARF from Sig. […]
There are a few more construction tasks left before this airplane is ready for her first trip outside the shop. They may be small, but they will attract the attention of anyone who looks at the model. I’m going to finish the cockpit by adding the windshield glazing, some coaming and padding, and a dummy […]
It’s time to put some paint on this airplane. If this were going to be a competitive model I would already have gathered whatever color references were available, most likely photos or published artwork, determined exactly which paint products I would need to get the most accurate possible reproduction of the colors on the full […]