bartholomule
Junior Member
I had a few small motors and speed controllers, so I thought I would try making some scaled-down versions of some of the FT planes. I have played with making a few small self-designed foam planes to get a rough guess of how well the wings would work when scaled down.
The first of the planes that I am scaling down is the FT Old Speedster. I decided on a 47% scale because it was really easy to fit 4 pages of the normal plans on a single sheet of paper at this scale. Since the pod would be too heavy at this scale, I won't be making this version swappable.
Here's my incomplete speedster in the current rough form:
It may not be obvious, but due to previous experiments with larger wings on the full-sized Old Fogey and the other mini failures, I increased the wingspan by roughly 26% over a perfectly-scaled version, so that the middle section of the wing is 11.5 inches wide instead of the approximately scaled 9.375 inches.
I threw some weight on there to simulate the weight with the other electronics and gave it a little glide test. It didn't travel as far as I thought it should (too much lift and then stalled; needed some down elevator), but with the final parts and added weight of some mini landing gear it should fly just fine.
It is still a work in progress, but I saw that someone else was experimenting with a 48% bloody wonder, so I thought I would share as well.
The first of the planes that I am scaling down is the FT Old Speedster. I decided on a 47% scale because it was really easy to fit 4 pages of the normal plans on a single sheet of paper at this scale. Since the pod would be too heavy at this scale, I won't be making this version swappable.
Here's my incomplete speedster in the current rough form:
It may not be obvious, but due to previous experiments with larger wings on the full-sized Old Fogey and the other mini failures, I increased the wingspan by roughly 26% over a perfectly-scaled version, so that the middle section of the wing is 11.5 inches wide instead of the approximately scaled 9.375 inches.
I threw some weight on there to simulate the weight with the other electronics and gave it a little glide test. It didn't travel as far as I thought it should (too much lift and then stalled; needed some down elevator), but with the final parts and added weight of some mini landing gear it should fly just fine.
It is still a work in progress, but I saw that someone else was experimenting with a 48% bloody wonder, so I thought I would share as well.