The Snowball was the brain child of RCGroups.com fourm member Lee. He smashed together two ideas from fellow scratch builders goldguy and Larry3215 to create the "ATV" of foam board planes.
What separates the Snowball from a Nutball are the raised motor and the pontoons on the belly.
Snow does not mix well with foam board, as everyone knows, so we built these big guys out of 1/2 inch insulation foam.
It worked well with repelling water, but the material was too brittle in the cold. To see their untimely death check out the episode.
So now we were back to square one, or circle one in this case. How can you make a Snowball that loves snow?
Minwax is always a good choice but it's messy and we wanted to find some better solutions. So here are 3 of our favorites.
1. Camp Dry
This is simply a silicone spray ment to help repel water off of boots and camping tents. The easiest way to apply it to your plane is to assemble it first (glue and stickers will not stick if you spray before you build!), tape off any electronics, and give it a good coat. Keep in mind this stuff is NOT water PROOF, it is water RESISTANT. Even that being said, this technique works very well.
2. Colored Packing Tape
You can pick this stuff up all over the place. We got ours from LazerToyz.com.
This method was the cheapest but most time consuming. The cool part is getting to design your own color scheme! Here, Alex went with "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow(ball)". Just make sure that if you are gluing two surfaces together, cut the tape away because the glue won't adhere too well to the shiny surface.
3. Laminate Contact Paper
This is another one that you can get at almost any craft store. This was more expensive than the tape method but looks much cleaner.
The rolls come in a variety of sizes. Same thing as the tape method if you are gluing two surfaces together. Remove the laminate from whatever surfaces you want to glue together.
This is the finished contact paper version. Shout out to Nolan, Blake, Randy, and Jedd from plane-awesome.com for sending us some stickers! Check out their reviews and send 'em some love!
Once we had our planes armored up, we took them for a spin!
We were happy with all these techniques to help our planes combat the harsh season. Use which ever method is more convenient for your project.
If you want to turn your Nutball into a Snowball (or maybe add some floats to your FT-Flyer) we will have a conversion kit and plans available on Wednesday, February 19th!
Thanks again to Lee, goldguy, and Larry3215 for the inspiration! And thanks to you for watching!
LINKS
- Swappable 3 Pack (for a Nutball speed build kit)
- Nutball Scratch Build (for free Nutball plans)
- Lee's Snowball Thread
- goldguy's Nutball Thread
- Larry3251's Capricorn Thread
- Colored Packing Tape
- plane-awesome.com