damifino

Anyone bought an Almost-Ready to-Cover Giant Aeromaster from Great Planes? If so, please post some 'in the bones' pictures. Looks like a good candidate for a kit bash into a Great Lakes clone to me.

dgliderguy

Hey, Damifino,

I got the ARC version, so I can change the lines a bit, and make a glider tug out of it. Going to make mine look sorta like a Bucker, with red checkerboards on a yellow base, new, sexier tail shape, open cockpit with windscreen, new longer landing gear legs and big criss-cross treaded tires. I'm going to hang my Fuji BT64EI on the firewall with the thrustline raised, and make a custom cowl out of wood and ply sheet with nosebowl and hinged sides.

The advantage of an ARC is you can bash like crazy without having to rip off perfectly good covering material. I will post pics later in the week, when it finally lands on the old building board. In the meantime, there's this guy's project that I found on the 'net: http://www.snhrcc.org/pages/photos1.htm I think its a kit version, not sure.

Don.

dgliderguy

Here's my first step-- modify the tail to look more attractive than the really boring square shape that comes in the stock kit. I removed some material from the leading edge of the fin, and added material to the rudder, for the same total area, but the shape is more agreeable to my eye. I also recontoured the elevator outline, with a spanwise-tapered trailing edge and more rounded tips.

Next up is to make the open cockpit mod-- adding a skirt and a flat windscreen.

NM2K

My Feedback: (14)

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Does almost count? <G>

I ordered the ARF just yesterday. I need a steed to power with my RC Ignitions G62 Lite.


Ed Cregger

dgliderguy

Hey, Ed! Good go, man, show some pics here when you get 'er started!

Here's my cockpit rework-- added a skirt out of 1/16th balsa, and I cut away the canted former so I could put in an instrument panel on the vertical former just forward of the canted one. Once I get the pilot in the cockpit, you won't be able to see much of the instrument panel, but I couldn't see just sticking instruments on the canted former, right under the pilot's chin! Just wouldn't look right.

Once I get it covered I will add cockpit combing around the skirt edge, for that finishing touch.

Next up is the engine. Ed, glad to see someone else is going big on the powerplant. I'll be interested to see how well your G62 hangs off the firewall. I'm going to make my own cowl out of wood, when the time comes.

dgliderguy

Got my Fuji BT64EI mounted tonight. Those are nylon 1/4" washers stacked up four thick to shim the engine forward. The cylinder wouldn't clear the firewall without them. If they turn out to be too squishy in service, I'll put in a 3/8th inch ply shim plate instead, but they seem rock solid. I will be installing the bolts with blue Locktite for final installation.

I raised the thrustline about an inch. I'm not going to use the stock radial cowl (looks yucky); I will be making one out of wood instead, with a balsa nose bowl and ply sheet sides. That's my next step.

I was going to buy a better pilot, but I decided the kit supplied pilot bust looks the part after all, and hey, I already got him. He'll do for now, anyway.

dgliderguy

I decided to redesign the servo installation on the wings. I don't know how we got to the place where we all accept the now common practice of mounting our servos so that the entire top half sticks out into the breeze, but jeesh it looks terrible! So I cut a larger opening and made a flush hatch, with a slot for the servo arm. MUCH better. You can see the "before" and the "after" in the below pics.

I also rounded the wing tips, for no other reason than to make mine look different from all the other Giant Aeromasters in the world. Individualism in the world of cookie-cutter ARFs!

damifino

Looking good!

dgliderguy

Well, after much deliberation on how best to wrap a cowl around this motor, and after searching far and wide for an after-market cowl that might perhaps work, I finally decided to just cut off the inlet ring on the kit-supplied cowl and replace it with a nosebowl made from a balsa plug. I drew up the nosebowl as a tracing, overlaid on top of the firewall outline for proper positioning, then used the tracing to cut a plug out of some soft 1" thick balsa from my stash. Added chopped glass mixed with 30-minute epoxy to fix the plug into the cowl. Next is to radius the edges of the balsa plug, and cut air inlets (for looks). With this arrangement, I can now center the prop hub hole concentric to the shaft, which has been raised 1" from the stock position.

The cowl will require a large relief on the bottom, to clear the engine cylinder, a big hole in the side to clear the muffler, and another hole on the other side for the carb to stick through. With all the clearance cuts, there will be plenty of air whooshing past the hot metal, so no problems with overheating.

Yak18

My Feedback: (11)

dgliderguy, I really like your mods...much better looking than stock.

Yak

dgliderguy

Yak18, thanks. It don't take much fiddling to fix up the more egregious eyesores, just a few adjustments here and there (like that toilet bowl nose ring on the cowl!). I don't really care much for the stock looks of the Giant Aeromaster, but it has potential.

Anyway, time to dust off this thread. I finally freed myself from some other model airplane projects I had to finish up, and I got some time to work on the Aeromaster again.

Fitting the cowl was a pain, because when I held it in the proper position to where the prop hole was centered at the prop shaft location, it didn't touch anything anywhere, so waddaya gonna do. I like to use bond paper templates, taped to the sides of the fuselage, to mark the protruding features of the engine, and then remove the engine and replace the cowl. The instructions show this technique; nothing new. So when you swing the paper templates back into position to mark the cutouts onto the cowl, the cowl is 'free-floating'. Not good! I was lucky to find a rolled cardboard tube that was almost precisely the same OD as the ID of my prop hole, and I hot-glued it to a balsa plate and bolted it to the firewall at the thrust centerline. The cowl slipped over the tube with friction, so I could locate it with total precision, not just on centerline but at the correct distance from the firewall. Yeah, baby. Mark away!

The engine sticks out quite a lot, particularly the muffler, but I won't have to worry about induction cooling with this installation. I had to slice the side to clear the carb, but I will add screws on either side of the cut to suit.

I also dug out my router attachment for the Dremel, and with some careful close-up work, I routed out the air inlets to a depth of about half an inch. I think I'll stop there, rather than going with thru-holes, and just paint the inlets black. This will provide the visual results without having to cut all the way through that deep nose bowl.