DeaninMilwaukee

I was searching in my basement through my older airplane pile o’ stuff, when I came across my old Drenalyn micro 3d plane. I built this plane years ago in around March 2002, right before my first every domefly event. I had been looking for something more fun to fly at this event than my GWS Litestick, but that could hopefully reuse all the same parts. From a rcgroups thread, I found the plans for the little drenalyn which I downloaded and built as a 16″ span. At the time, you couldn’t easily get sheets of depron foam, and instead had to use foamcoreboard with the paper coverings soaked soft in a water bathand then peeled off. The build itself was easy with tape hinges and hot glue holding everything together.

The final ready to fly weight came up at a very light for the time 6 oz, and that meant it had enough thrust to slowly pull out of a hover. That was a big deal back then for a micro plane, and this is the plane I learned to hover on. It really could have been considered a hover trainer as it was very stable in any sort of nose hight flight. It also did fairly well inverted and rolled very nicely. The now unusual undercamber wing shape didn’t interfere with most performance flight, but did allow the plane to stay airborne while throttled way back which contributed to long 20 minutes plus flight times. I built four of these as I crash wrecked each one, and they all saw a lot of flight hours. The final one, shown here, has a brushless feigao 12mm motor in it, which gave it around a 2:1 thrust to weight ratio

All in all, this was one of my favorite planes.

Dean