Globe Temco Swift (sort of)

earthsciteach

Moderator
Moderator
I was chatting with FlyingMonkey a bit ago and he was pitching some contest ideas. One of those was "build an airplane from a single sheet of foam board." I already had a set up plans from my very first scratch build that I actually could scale up to meet this requirement. My very first scratch build was intended to be a micro flier of my favorite civilian airplane, the Globe Temco Swift.
GlobeSwift_1.jpg

This plane was produced from 1946 into 1951. The wings and tail feathers have the lines of a P-40. One of the designers of the production model was one of those who designed the P-40. It is simply a beautiful aircraft.

This version won't do it justice, but being intended to be built from a single sheet of dollar store foam I can't expect too much. I'll build a nice, scale version one of these days. Here is what I have so far:
Swift foam board.JPG
I'm playing around with the idea of making my own retracts for this using the landing gear from my 800mm Spitfire. It would be fairly easy to do, but I don't know how well it would hold up. Might be worth a shot, though. The canopy and cowling will be formed from 2 liter soda bottles. I gave up on the single sheet idea. I could have done it if I used a KF airfoil, but can't bring myself to use that on a Swift.

I'm going to power it with a Emax CF2812 with a 7x4e prop. Should be quite fast.
 

earthsciteach

Moderator
Moderator
Thank you! Currently, I'm working out ideas of how to skin the top of the wing. I'm wondering how compressing the foam with a heated roller would work. A thinner, more flexible foam skin would work better than the standard thickness of foam board, I think. I also will add in bulkheads to created a rounded fuselage top from the canopy back to the tail. I wish I could set everything else going on aside and work on this, but that isn't possible. That dang, pesky teaching job and home life get in the way.