JasonEricAnderson
Senior Member
I was a scale model airplane builder as a kid, not RC but your standard plastic models. While walking down the isle at the hobby shop I caught my first glimpse of the Rockwell Bronco and I HAD to build that plane. Something about it made an impression, with it's twin prop, twin rudder, high tail, and a central fuselage with it's high, bubble cockpit. It looked like a mash up of a P38 Lightning and a Huey Cobra, so ugly with so much visual attitude.
In a cold war age dominated by the screaming air superiority platforms of the F14,F15, and then new F18&F16 this was a small, close support fixed wing that was designed to use roads for runways if it had to (20ft wide road). Versions of it were used for everything from Air-to-ground attack, night attack, paratrooper insertion, air ambulance, reconnaissance, and it's currently used by California to fight wildfires.
My own personal encounter with a Bronco in Pima AZ
While watching the FT Cruiser supplemental video I realized that here was an awesome twin engine platform that might be able to be packed into a swappable dollar store foam core Bronco!
So I'm going to try and design/build/test fly my own design of a Bronco, what could possibly go wrong?
I'm starting out with google sketch up and I'll try and document as much as I can. I'm using a very precise technique called "iBalling-IT".
I located a good three view of the aircraft and pulled it into Google Sketchup and applied it to a rectangle. I've also built a virtual power pod to scale and I'm sizing the plans to fit the power pod into one of the nacelles.
I then drew the outline of the wing...
...and then drew the center fuselage profile shapes.
I followed this up with the nacelles, rudder, elevator and top view of the center fuselage.
I pulled up copies of my geometry and extruded them 3/16th of an inch to give myself some virtual foam board shapes to work with.
I continued this technique of building up a simple 'cut out' shape and then extruding the thickness. Once I get the whole thing worked out I'll have to go back and plan out my 50% cuts, A&B folds and where some panels will meet when the real foam core is cut out.
Here I've pulled in a virtual power pod to continue my super precise "iBalling-IT" and work on the nacelles.
For giggles I wanted to see how a KF airfoil would look but I'm going to redo the wing to be closer to the FT Baby Blender airfoil.
That is as far as I've got but I'll update this as I go along. In the end I hope I'll have a fairly good approximation of the Bronco that (hopefully) flys with many of the STOL characteristics of the full size aircraft.
In a cold war age dominated by the screaming air superiority platforms of the F14,F15, and then new F18&F16 this was a small, close support fixed wing that was designed to use roads for runways if it had to (20ft wide road). Versions of it were used for everything from Air-to-ground attack, night attack, paratrooper insertion, air ambulance, reconnaissance, and it's currently used by California to fight wildfires.
My own personal encounter with a Bronco in Pima AZ
While watching the FT Cruiser supplemental video I realized that here was an awesome twin engine platform that might be able to be packed into a swappable dollar store foam core Bronco!
So I'm going to try and design/build/test fly my own design of a Bronco, what could possibly go wrong?
I'm starting out with google sketch up and I'll try and document as much as I can. I'm using a very precise technique called "iBalling-IT".
I located a good three view of the aircraft and pulled it into Google Sketchup and applied it to a rectangle. I've also built a virtual power pod to scale and I'm sizing the plans to fit the power pod into one of the nacelles.
I then drew the outline of the wing...
...and then drew the center fuselage profile shapes.
I followed this up with the nacelles, rudder, elevator and top view of the center fuselage.
I pulled up copies of my geometry and extruded them 3/16th of an inch to give myself some virtual foam board shapes to work with.
I continued this technique of building up a simple 'cut out' shape and then extruding the thickness. Once I get the whole thing worked out I'll have to go back and plan out my 50% cuts, A&B folds and where some panels will meet when the real foam core is cut out.
Here I've pulled in a virtual power pod to continue my super precise "iBalling-IT" and work on the nacelles.
For giggles I wanted to see how a KF airfoil would look but I'm going to redo the wing to be closer to the FT Baby Blender airfoil.
That is as far as I've got but I'll update this as I go along. In the end I hope I'll have a fairly good approximation of the Bronco that (hopefully) flys with many of the STOL characteristics of the full size aircraft.
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. I got to see one of the CALFire OV-10's fly by my work one day too. Thing sounded awesome as it made a big banked turn, twin turbo props roaring.
