How to resize FT plans with accuracy.

Kunphushun

Member
Great video. Do you have plans to show people how to resize the A and B folds?

Not yet, I am working on it, but a person could do a couple things.

1. After scaling the plans they could manually manipulate the folds on teh plans with ruler and pen.
2. If they go to 200% the folds actually take two sheets of foam board so thats what I use. I will double up on one of the mating surfaces so the fold goes over two sheets. It adds strength and what not.
3. Im learning this now. One could use the program Inkscape and adjust the plans to account for the difference in foam thickness. Its a little tricky because you have to keep construction in mind when doing so.

Ya'll could learn alot about the program watching Nerdnic's series on how to make plans for foam airplanes.
 

mayan

Legendary member
Tip. If you have access to 3mm FB you can scale down to 75% that will give you a prefect match. If you want to upsale to 200% then it's also easy you can just use 10mm FB.
 
I use adobe acrobat to resize and print any part of a plan. If I need only vertical stabilizer I am able to print only that part. Or if I need to scale down 64% I resize the plan and also reorganize the parts so I can fit in as many parts as I can in one sheet or 2.
 

GremlinRC

FT_Nut
Good job Man. Excellent video. Just adding a couple of my tips from my own experience. Minimising the whitespace around the part or plan makes it far more likely that you will get it on less pages when printing. If you add too much adobe reader thinks it has to print that too and can result in extra pages. I found that if you are scaling between 70% and 130%, most of the time you can get away with the a and b folds as they are. However if you want to go bigger (or smaller, there seems to be no other option but to either spend hours and hours redrawing or alternatively, judiciously cut the slots back to 4.5mm. You cant just center your new slot over the old one everytime. You gotta look at how it fits with the parts it mates to. A good example of this is the battery box for the FT P47. If you simply center the slots, then the battery box will be too wide to slide into the formers. You can either bend your brain figuring out where to place the slots or just roll with it and just trim the formers when building. This concept probably applies to most models. IMO your better off just leaving the slots as-is and figuring it out when building. Rescaling these birds requires practice and skill and the ability to adapt and there will be stuff you will just have to think about and modify to make it work.

Thanks again to the OP for taking the time to share this.