Sponz, First I want to thank you for all of your hard work in designing and perfecting so many great plane designs and sharing with the community here. Second, and less important is that I am looking to have some of your plans printed out and sent to me (we do not have a printer at the moment) so I have put a post out on the FT Forums offering to pay some willing community member to do so. On a recommendation from CraftyDan one of the planes I will be building as my first scratch build (I have to do 3 - one for each of my 3 kiddos, see
my plan here) is the tiny trainer (I may end up building 3 of these in fact) and I was wondering if it would be worth my time to try and somehow transfer the screen image to paper by simple method of scaling the screen image to close as possible and taping the paper to the screen then tracing the lines. If this is foolish, let me know and I will just wait until I find a way to get the plans printed. Thanks again for your efforts here! - Shane
Shane, thanks for the kind words regarding the plans. I would not be flying myself had it not been for Flite Test. They have significantly reduced the initial start-up cost and stress of getting into the hobby. I now get to fly with my son, father, brother, nephew, and brother-in-law. I might even get my father-in-law in the air this year. I owe much of that to Flite Test. Sharing my designs and updating some plans to make them easier for people to use is my way of paying it forward.
Regarding getting paper plans, have you considered trying a local print shop? If you have a store like a Kinko's or a Staples in your area, they can usually print the full-size plans for very little cost. If you decide to go that route, make sure you ask for black-and-white prints. Printing in color is much more expensive. The full-size plans will also save you a little time cutting and taping the plans together. However, if this is not an option for you, I will send you the paper plans for the FT Tiny Trainer at no cost.
I would NOT recommend trying to trace the plans onto paper from the computer screen. I don't think there is a way to get the scaling right if you do that.
I would recommend that you start with the FT Tiny Trainer for all three kids. It is a plane they can grow with and you will get comfortable building it. It incorporates all of the FT build techniques into a beginner to intermediate plane. Also, if you make a set of templates for it, you will only need one set of plans to start out with. The technique I use to make my templates is outlined in my Blog Entries (the link is on the left <--). This is a pretty inexpensive way to make a template that can be used over and over again without having to print, cut and tape plans every time.