futz
Junior Member
After twenty-some years out of the hobby I recently got interested in flying RC again. Bought a new radio and a Hobby King Slow Stick ARF and started learning to fly from square one again. I know what to do, but all the flying memory is gone. I'm a noob again, crashing constantly.
I first started building and flying in high school back in the late 70's. Then I lost interest until sometime in the early 90's, when I went a little RC crazy and built and flew quite a bit. Then I lost interest again until about a month ago.
Over the years things have changed fairly radically in the hobby, to say the least. Every time I come back to it I have to buy new radio equipment. My first radio was an EK Logictrol 5 channel LRB system. Then in the 90's I ran a Futaba. Now it's an el cheapo Turnigy 9X. Transmitters are cheap now, servos and receivers are throw-away cheap. FPV is not only possible, but cheap! We never saw any of that coming in the 70's or even in the 90's. Channel hopping radios with no worries about other people on the same channel are awesome! It's a different world now!
I found flitetest.com on YouTube and watched all the videos. Being an old balsa builder I just couldn't comprehend how folded foamboard could possibly be strong enough. Wings with no real spars or dihedral braces just boggled my mind... until I built myself an FT Tiny Trainer. The wings are surprisingly strong for what they're made of - I guess it's the sort of monocoque construction and the folds that do it. Smart engineering, and the added bonus of ultra cheap, simple, fast construction - and low weight to boot. Nice!
Back in the 90's I used to fly a Sig Kadet (the original version) with an OS .35 engine that I had built in the 70's and never flown. I never was totally comfortable with that plane, but I wanted a 1/2A version, so I scaled the paper plans (by hand with a home made proportional divider) and built a small 36" span balsa version powered by a Cox TD .049 glow engine.
It flew amazing! Way better than the full size Kadet! It was super fun to fly 3 channel - a wing with ailerons would have made it even better, but I never got around to building one. I flew the snot out of that little plane until parts of the fuselage were badly oil soaked, and then stripped it down to replace the soaked parts, but got busy with work and lost interest in RC again until now.
It used to have a black doped paper windshield. It was oil soaked and got stripped with the rest.
Recently I was thinking that the Mini Kadet would be a natural for a FT-style foam board build and electric power. Back in the 90's I redrew my paper plans for the plane in CAD, and still had the old TurboCAD file on one of the hard drives here. I converted that to DXF so I could import it to DraftSight (a superb CAD program for the price BTW) and redrew the whole thing in DWG format. I still have my two old balsa wings for it that could be used, but decided to draw and build a foamboard wing for it as well.
I flattened the cowl and windshield area to make building much simpler. If you want it to be a bit more streamlined and look better just build it rounded.
I may yet do some redesign on the wing. I'm not sure I like having that spacer in there.
For the build, since I'm in Canada, I'm using Ross foamboard from Dollarama, made by Elmer's. It weighs 129 grams per sheet, and seems to build almost exactly like DTFB.
I like building almost more than I like flying, and I haven't gotten beyond framing up this airplane. I have not flown it yet, but if it flies half as good as the original Mini Kadet I'm pretty sure it will be awesome.
See my blobby sloppy glue joints? See where I glued the top of the fuselage to the table and had to chisel it off? I built it with a super old and crappy glue gun and some ancient glue sticks. They didn't work very well. I have since bought a 100W Surebonder gun and good quality new glue sticks. They work a lot better and aren't such a fight to use.
I have DWG (and DXF and PDF) plans if anyone wants a copy. They're not perfect, but if you're a regular scratch builder you'll figure them out and/or modify them to suit yourself. Here's a link to the rar file.
I have no automatic way to make tiled plans. I use a convoluted method to make my own with DraftSight, printing to PDF and then use Adobe Reader to manually print one page at a time on my laser printer. Works pretty good.
I run pretty much exclusively Linux machines (I hate MS Windows), so all plan work is done with DraftSight, Inkscape (for PDF to DXF conversions) and an old version of Adobe Reader for Linux (no longer available - thanks a lot Adobe - always hated Adobe Reader on Windows, but the Linux version was pretty good).
I first started building and flying in high school back in the late 70's. Then I lost interest until sometime in the early 90's, when I went a little RC crazy and built and flew quite a bit. Then I lost interest again until about a month ago.
Over the years things have changed fairly radically in the hobby, to say the least. Every time I come back to it I have to buy new radio equipment. My first radio was an EK Logictrol 5 channel LRB system. Then in the 90's I ran a Futaba. Now it's an el cheapo Turnigy 9X. Transmitters are cheap now, servos and receivers are throw-away cheap. FPV is not only possible, but cheap! We never saw any of that coming in the 70's or even in the 90's. Channel hopping radios with no worries about other people on the same channel are awesome! It's a different world now!
I found flitetest.com on YouTube and watched all the videos. Being an old balsa builder I just couldn't comprehend how folded foamboard could possibly be strong enough. Wings with no real spars or dihedral braces just boggled my mind... until I built myself an FT Tiny Trainer. The wings are surprisingly strong for what they're made of - I guess it's the sort of monocoque construction and the folds that do it. Smart engineering, and the added bonus of ultra cheap, simple, fast construction - and low weight to boot. Nice!
Back in the 90's I used to fly a Sig Kadet (the original version) with an OS .35 engine that I had built in the 70's and never flown. I never was totally comfortable with that plane, but I wanted a 1/2A version, so I scaled the paper plans (by hand with a home made proportional divider) and built a small 36" span balsa version powered by a Cox TD .049 glow engine.
It flew amazing! Way better than the full size Kadet! It was super fun to fly 3 channel - a wing with ailerons would have made it even better, but I never got around to building one. I flew the snot out of that little plane until parts of the fuselage were badly oil soaked, and then stripped it down to replace the soaked parts, but got busy with work and lost interest in RC again until now.
It used to have a black doped paper windshield. It was oil soaked and got stripped with the rest.
Recently I was thinking that the Mini Kadet would be a natural for a FT-style foam board build and electric power. Back in the 90's I redrew my paper plans for the plane in CAD, and still had the old TurboCAD file on one of the hard drives here. I converted that to DXF so I could import it to DraftSight (a superb CAD program for the price BTW) and redrew the whole thing in DWG format. I still have my two old balsa wings for it that could be used, but decided to draw and build a foamboard wing for it as well.
I flattened the cowl and windshield area to make building much simpler. If you want it to be a bit more streamlined and look better just build it rounded.
I may yet do some redesign on the wing. I'm not sure I like having that spacer in there.
For the build, since I'm in Canada, I'm using Ross foamboard from Dollarama, made by Elmer's. It weighs 129 grams per sheet, and seems to build almost exactly like DTFB.
I like building almost more than I like flying, and I haven't gotten beyond framing up this airplane. I have not flown it yet, but if it flies half as good as the original Mini Kadet I'm pretty sure it will be awesome.
See my blobby sloppy glue joints? See where I glued the top of the fuselage to the table and had to chisel it off? I built it with a super old and crappy glue gun and some ancient glue sticks. They didn't work very well. I have since bought a 100W Surebonder gun and good quality new glue sticks. They work a lot better and aren't such a fight to use.
I have DWG (and DXF and PDF) plans if anyone wants a copy. They're not perfect, but if you're a regular scratch builder you'll figure them out and/or modify them to suit yourself. Here's a link to the rar file.
I have no automatic way to make tiled plans. I use a convoluted method to make my own with DraftSight, printing to PDF and then use Adobe Reader to manually print one page at a time on my laser printer. Works pretty good.
I run pretty much exclusively Linux machines (I hate MS Windows), so all plan work is done with DraftSight, Inkscape (for PDF to DXF conversions) and an old version of Adobe Reader for Linux (no longer available - thanks a lot Adobe - always hated Adobe Reader on Windows, but the Linux version was pretty good).
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