Are there any wing designs that take the full (almost) 30 inches of a sheet of dollar tree foamboard? Cutting wingtips is always a pain and the edges of foam board are perfectly straight cuts. Could an existing wing's score cuts be stretched out to the end of foamboard and maintain good flight characteristics?
Full Foamboard Sheet Wing
- Thread starter Matt53
- Start date
Figure9
Elite member
Welcome to the Forum. I mess with wing designs a lot. What I do is take a known wing plan from the FT free plans & adapt it into my own design that I like better. The pic is of a rectangle shape from a Simple Stick stretched from 36” wingspan to 48’ span & tapered out to the tips for improved roll control with the long wing. The FT Bloody Baron has a wing that you can cut from a single foam board. It has about a 29” span as I recall & about an 8” chord. DTFB is only a $ buck $, so I just redraw the lines I want right on top of the free plan (I copy the tiled plans on 8.5 X 11 paper & tape them up.) & if it doesn’t fold up right when I cut it out of the DTFB, I’ll just grab another board & try again.
Note that on this plan I cut the the wing design in half & taped the halves on the DTFB then drew the new plan out on the foam board itself. You can stretch or modify it as you wish & it still fits on the fuselage design if you don’t modify the attachment points.
Good luck, on the forum they often say, “Build, Fly, Crash & Repeat”.
Thanks!Welcome to the Forum. I mess with wing designs a lot. What I do is take a known wing plan from the FT free plans & adapt it into my own design that I like better. The pic is of a rectangle shape from a Simple Stick stretched from 36” wingspan to 48’ span & tapered out to the tips for improved roll control with the long wing. The FT Bloody Baron has a wing that you can cut from a single foam board. It has about a 29” span as I recall & about an 8” chord. DTFB is only a $ buck $, so I just redraw the lines I want right on top of the free plan (I copy the tiled plans on 8.5 X 11 paper & tape them up.) & if it doesn’t fold up right when I cut it out of the DTFB, I’ll just grab another board & try again.
View attachment 164580
Note that on this plan I cut the the wing design in half & taped the halves on the DTFB then drew the new plan out on the foam board itself. You can stretch or modify it as you wish & it still fits on the fuselage design if you don’t modify the attachment points. View attachment 164581
Good luck, on the forum they often say, “Build, Fly, Crash & Repeat”.
Would changing the wingspan have any affect on CG? I think I may just scale down the simple stick wing but use 1 sheet.
Do you think it would be a better idea to scale down a stick wing or scale up a bloody baron wing?
Kind of low on foam and I can't easily get any new right now so I'm doing my best to plan more than usual.
Figure9
Elite member
A rectangle shaped wing would not alter the center of lift if all you do is expand or reduce the wing span, therefore you will not usually be required to recalculate the CG or relocate the wing on the fuselage (as a rule). On tapered wings changing the span might change the CG & on swept wings it definitely would. The rule of thumb for a rectangle wing is 30 to 40% aft of the leading edge, with the wing supported at that point by the tips, the nose of the aircraft should dip down slightly. When I modify a wing, before I commit to the wing location on the fuselage I usually do a temporary attachment with rubber bands or adhesive hook & loop to get the balance. On high wings it’s easy but takes a bit of thinking with low wings, like doing it with the aircraft upside down. Most of the FT designs are easily balanced by moving battery weight fore or aft. The balance test I described above is usually adequate. You won’t need to, but try it anyway & see how it looks. I usually also balance an aircraft longitudinally by supporting it under the prop hub & tail to see if the wings balance out level. It’s not as important but if the wing levels out the low speed performance might be more gentle, like during hand launch, takeoff & landing.
How much does the placement of the wing affect flight characteristics on a simple stick style plane?
Figure9
Elite member
@Matt53 The Simple Stick is a solid well balanced design. If you use @The Hangar plan & merely shorten the wing, the location of the wing on the fuselage would not need to be altered. A clipped wing Simple Stick might be a handful, it has large tail control surfaces & long ailerons. That would be about 6” off the wingspan of a 100% Simple Stick. It’s not hard to join wings at the center section. To make the tips easier to do you could try not using the single FB layer out at the tips & expand the folded portion out the for the same wingspan as the plan calls for. The result would fly about the same & the wing would balance the about the same.
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