Vimana89
Legendary member
This is a sweet mod. I fly mostly in a gritty desert lot across my street, and hand launch/belly land everything. The bottom of the nose box on my V Sliver delta(and the one on a plane I'm building for the FTFC20 challenge) design has a similar curve and flat surface which make contact with the ground and get pretty scuffed up. I've just been using a strip of heavy duty packing tape to do the same job, and it holds up alright, but not as good as this would.I just rinse out a milk jug cut the top and bottom off and then slice it into flat sheets to use.
A 6 pint jug yealds enough 'flat ' plastic to make the belly cover in one piece but I now use skimmed milk and they only sell it in 4 pint jugs vs 6 print jugs for semi and full fat annoyingly so I have to make my belly strip in two or three lengths.
I score the plastic in a diamond pattern to give the glue something to grip as milk jug is HDPE and then I just hot glue it to the underside of the plane.
It makes the belly indestructible for landings I land on hard mud and even gravel and bare foam gets trashed on just grass let alone hard ground.
Below is my VERY well used daily cub, it's got a couple of hundred hours on that plane and you can see the scrapes in the paint but the plastic is holding out fine.
Also below is a new build of a GPS cub which I haven't finished yet and haven't painted the plastic yet and you can see what I've done a bit clearer.
although the rest of the fuse is already painted, I always put the plastic on after and blow over it, painting the fuse first makes a stronger surface on the foam under the plastic and stops it pulling the paper soon the foam when it flexes on hard landings.
I put it on all belly landing planes now, the plane lasts and lasts and as I've pointed out in an earlier post, in a crash the nose will crumple but the belly plastic limits how far back the damage goes and will flex in a crash absorbing the force instead of just transferring it further down the fuse. View attachment 139510 View attachment 139511
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