Fisher

Critter,

I do plan to get out hunting next year. My son is getting old enough to go along.

It should take less than 4 hours to cut and sand all the pieces to put your plane together once you have all the tools built or purchased. Making the hotwire cutter and templates and trying them out took the most time.

Takes about 15 - 20 minutes to assemble the airframe (easiest part of the process). Not sure about putting the electronics into it but that shouldn't take more then and hour or two.

I think that you should go big when you build yours. Like you were already talking about but double all dimensions. One of these planes flying by with a 6' wing span would look great. Should weight ~4 times what this one does (80 oz) or less. You would have to probably build a two piece wing and put a real spar into it.

Hope to have the motor and ESC from Balsapr this week.

Have fun.

Fisher

Critterhunter,

I finished the plane last night! Well at least it could fly right now if it were not so bloody cold and I could find a good place to land it. AUW is only 15 oz., with a BL-21 motor, 7x4 prop and 3 cell Diamond LiPo on it. The plane should go vertical if I am gentle with it. I think the wing will just fold in two if I get too aggressive with it. Seems like I should just go ahead and cover most of it with packing tape like the Stryker before parts start falling off. Took so long to get it built and ready to fly I need a short rest before I put it in the air. I had it running in the house last night and it wanted to climb straight up out of my hand at slightly less than full throttle.

critterhunter

Good for you on finishing the plane! I know the feeling as I just spent about two weeks figuring out a good way to replace the fishing line on the Extreme with control rods. Fought it tooth and nail with a lot of false starts, but this morning I won the battle and am very happy with the results! Well..., I haven't flown it yet but things look good on the ground with no binding and great flap movement. So, that's two birds down...A new body build for my BP21 and Stryker using all my latest mods...which has only been on one maiden flight thus far, and now the final piece to my Extreme's conversion to standard electronics...so she gets to sit there and rest for better weather as well. Well, I might convert the wing mounting on it from rubberbands to wing nuts and two bolts so I don't have to trust the rubberbands to hold the wing anymore.

So, that leaves my poor Challenger that is in bad need of a BP21, standard electronics and control rods. But, think I'll leave that project on the shelf until I build one of these foamies.

No fair, you are beating me to using a BP21 and lipos in this bird build! I'm really anxious to hear how she does. Why aren't you using a 7x6 prop on this motor as it is the best all around size with it on the Stryker? I'd go ahead and throw a carbon tube through the entire wing and booms to avoid what you know will happen with the kind of speeds the BP21 can do. Short of that I'd at least use the strapping tape called "Extreme" that can be found at Office Max and other stores. If features strapping tape strands that go in both directions versus regular strapping tape. I use it on the Stryker in certain areas and man is it strong. It might be enough to hold the plane together at top speeds while stunting.

I'm still up in the air which size of this plane to build first...the stock size with a BP21 or the ramped up version with the 540 motor. It would be smarter to follow the stock size first and learn how to build the plane, but then again I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer. We'll let you know which one I start with when the mood hits and I begin the project...Maybe starting today since the weather outside is real bad and I'm not working today. Soon at least, very soon! Great job again and how about some pictures of that beauty?

Fisher

I did not use a 7x6 prop because I could not find one at my local hobby shop and since I only have a 15 amp speed control I did not want to get too close to the limits right off. I think the ESC could handle it but am not sure. I will be adding lots of the extreme strapping tape since I have two roles of it already. I did not want to start adding lots of weight to the first plane I built. The more weight the faster it needs to fly just to stay in the air and the more abuse the airframe takes when making turns etc... This is my first plane and I know I made a few mistakes.

!. I cut the aileron to narrow it should be 3" wide and it is only 2" wide. I can cut it out further and replace it but looking at servo placement means that I would have to remount the servo and I do not want to tear this one up that much to correct it since I have a second air frame already built I will make the corrections on that one and paint it up for better appearance.

2. The second blunder was not spending the money on a smaller RX the one I used is a large 8 channel that came with the radio. A small Berg micro stamp would have allowed me to avoid cutting a hole in the fuse to mount it. As it is the ESC is just Velcro'ed onto the bottom of the wing for cooling. The electonics install looks terrible but everything in taped down.I think it should be OK.

A couple of final tweaks and I will send it into the sky and hope it flies. It has warmed a bit so maybe sometime in the next week or so.

Fisher

Critterhunter,

Yeeeee! Haaaaawwwwww! Just got back from the maiden flight and all I can say is "This is a great first build plane." Thanks again for posting the link to begin with. The plane has very good flight characteristics and the BP 21 is a perfect match. I flew for more than 30 minutes on the Dimond Lipo and still had power left when I landed it on the ice. Quite a run out when the ice is a little wet. Slow speed was great. Nice low level fly bys and then dump the power to it and climb to 500' in a few seconds. Unpowered flight is as good or better than the Stryker. The extreme strapping tape was on the tail booms and another strip on top of the wing. Inverted flight was OK but I did not spend to much time upside down. Having only a 2" wide aileron meant that it did not have much of a roll rate. Dual airlerons would be great. I am very happy.

First toss with 3/4 throttle and she climed out with just a little trimming needed for straight and level flight. It is a little tail heavy since I added the extra tape to the booms after I mounted the battery. I will have to fix that but who cares right now. I am Happy!!!!

I did not attach this photo of the electronics install earlier because it is such a mess. But now that it flew so well who cares. You can see most of what I have on it.

critterhunter

Congrats on your maiden with this bird! Happy to hear things went well. You're too hard on yourself as the plane looks good to me. I'm surprised that the plane even did some inverted with only one flap...and a smaller one than it's supposed to have at that! Do you think one flap is good enough as I was considering using two flaps and servos...but if one at normal size is good enough I'll save myself the weight and the cost of another servo.

Also glad to hear the BP21 is working fine on it. I knew you'd get a kick out of that brushless motor and a lipo...Much less weight and much more power with gobs of flight time. One tip on the BP21...Do NOT overtighten the set screw that holds the motor to the mounting plate. If you overtork it big time it will slightly deform the shaft hole...causing the back bearing to blow. I've replaced more than a few bearings to fix that.

Also, you'll notice that there is not very much clearance between the three wires at the solder points on the motor and the mounting plate. I took off the motor mounting plate and put some thick glue like rubber cement around the plate's collar. This will prevent one of the three wires from shorting to the plate. I had one keep doing this on me in flight and it would shut down the ESC. Had to reset the throttle to get the motor to come back alive.

The coil windings behind the collar that hitch up to the three wires can also short against other windings. If you suspect a short try running the motor in a dark room and watching for a spark. It'll tell you real quick where the short is. I took a tiny screwdriver and just gently bent the windings away from the short they were making.

I think that speed control will work fine with the 7x6 prop. Is it a BP speed control? If so, while I'm using the BP30 amp it's way more than the BP21 needs...And the next size down (which should be the one you are using) is the ESC others have used with the 7x6 on the Stryker with no problems. Try running the motor at full throttle for a few minutes and touching the ESC heat sink. If it's only warm but not real hot then things should be fine. Then again, why not just touch it after a flight and see how warm it is? I've read that you can run a ESC on more amps then it's rated for by keeping it extra cool, so if anything keeping it's heat sink where it'll get some good air flow should take care of it.

Again, glad to hear she is doing well! Will it go verticle at all and for how long? I'm ITCHING to start this build after hearing your maiden report. First things first, have to build some hot wire cutting tools. This week's project...

Fisher

Critterhunter,

One full sized aileron (3" wide) should give good control but if you are looking for a high roll rate you might want to consider 2 ailerons. Either way the plane should fly very well. Just depends on how aggressive you want to get when flying your first home built plane. Almost forgot, one other place that the single airleron has trouble is at very slow speeds. Apparently not enough air movement to get much control over roll during very slow speed flight. I think you could harrier this plane if you had two ailerons. I cannot over state how well this plane flies. I think you would have to hit it with a hammer and maybe even leave the hammer stuck in the plane to make if fly poorly. I just followed Foamflyer’s advice and kept making sure everything was straight and square before I hot glued it. As I stated before, it is very easy to assemble this plane once you have all the pieces cut out. I built two full air frames and have 3 more wings left. I would suggest that you plan to cut 3 or more wings once you have everything set up. You could even make two planes, one with a single aileron and one with dual ailerons. I still think that a double dimension sized plane would be simple to build as long as you had the wing figured out. (I assume you would have to cut two 3' x 14" wings and join them together with a couple of carbon rods.)

The 7x4 prop it will go vertical for a hundred feet. or more. I think with the 7x6 you should have very good vertical but I am just guessing here. I flew the plane through another full battery and got a solid 30 minutes of continuous air time at mixed throttle settings. You can get this plane so high in just a short period of time that you will loose sight of it. I had to pull a fairly aggressive maneuver to keep from crashing it during a fast dive and the plane held together. I was expecting it to fold in half with as hard as I pulled back on the stick.

The Extreme strapping tape is great and sticks much better than the clear packing tape. The only place I am using the clear stuff is on the leading edge of the wing and to hold the wiring to the plane. I used the strapping tape on bottom and top of the wing to stiffen it and along the bottom and side of each tail boom to stiffen them. Worked great.

Thanks for all the tips on the BP21 I am sure to need them. Where do you get replacement bearings? Do they come with the new shafts?

Cheers,

critterhunter

Cool info and glad to hear another flight went well. I'll probably build the 540 motor version of the plane first as I want a big tank to fly around in the sky. The bearings...I have the size of them around here somewhere. I had ordered them from Balsa and a few replacement shafts because I didn't know the size but I think you can get that size at most hobby stores. You shouldn't have to replace the shaft or the bearings so long as you don't do something stupid like over tork the set screw on the mounting plate or wreck the plane really hard on the prop shaft some how. If a bearing does go, however, it will tend to want to become "one" with the shaft and/or the shaft hole in the motor. First time I tried to replace the "missing" bearing on one I couldn't get it onto the shaft, and soon realized one of the bumps on the shaft wasn't supposed to be there...it was part of the bearing that had melded to the shaft. Managed to get it off with a sharp knife. Also had bearing shells melded to the shaft hole in the motor that required a bit of drilling to remove. In the process of doing this you may screw up a shaft and that's why I picked up a few. The motor is supposed to turn "rough" by hand as that's the pull of the magnets. It will also have a bit of inward/outward play if you push on the bell a bit. What it shouldn't have is a side to side wabble or make a lot of noise while in the sky. A good smooth running BP21 with a balanced prop should be almost silent unless it's within 20 or 30 yards of you. Also, there is a little C-clip on the back of the motor that you might loose if the back bearing goes out. If you do need to take the motor apart, remove that c-clip and then pull hard on the bell/shaft...which should come straight out. The nut on the bell doesn't need to be removed unless you are taking the motor further apart. If you have it apart might as well dab a bit of bearing oil on both bearings once in a while. The back one by the C-clip can easily be oiled without taking anything off. Be REALLY careful with those three wires as I've had a few come off their solder points in the motor. Tape or glue them to the mounting plate or something to keep them from moving around too much from vibration and such. Also, if the motor seperates from the mounting plate (or the mounting plate seperates it and the motor from the plane's motor mount), the motor will quickly spin until it's ripped the three wires out of it's self. Ask me how I know. It's a thin line to cross with that set screw...Tighten it too much and you blow a bearing, but don't tighten it enough and the motor will come loose. I'd dab a bit of nail polish on it's head to keep it from vibrating loose.

Keep me informed on your progress...And am glad to hear the plane handles low speeds well as I too like low level fly bys at slow speeds.

critterhunter

By the way, the more of the shaft you cut off the motor to shorten it the less vibration you'll have at the prop. I also have tried various prop holder designs and they've all vibrated the prop or themselve's off the shaft in one way or another. The best adapter I've found is simply a small aluminum bullet adapter that has a set screw to secure it to the BP21 shaft. Grind a flat spot on the shaft where the set screw will sit. The prop is then attached to the adapter via a bullet head that is torked on via a small hole on the bullet to grasp and crank with something. Might be the same bullet prop adapter I see in your picture.

Fisher

Appreciate all your advice with the BP21. The manufacturer should hire you as tech support. You could work full time with a headset on and fly and build planes while you answer questions. Good luck with the 540 version. I can't wait to see how it turns out. What sort of wing span do you expect?

critterhunter

Don't know a thing...just experienced a enough bad luck to know what NOT to do. Any other information I learned was from reading the Stryker thread. Don't have my upscaling formula in front of me but the wingspan should be around 4 to 5 feet. I'll post some specs soon as I dig up the data.

critterhunter

Fisher, I've begun to take on the project. Just did a little skimming the net for homemade hot wire cutter info. First few articles I read didn't have much detail so I'll have to dig deeper. I've read that some guys use a car battery charger as the power source but haven't run across the voltage and amp requirements yet. I've got an old car/motorcycle battery charger in the garage that can be set at 6 or 12 volts and .2 to 1.2 amps variable...Or a single 6 amp setting. I'm guessing this might work but will have to find out what the requirements are to know for sure. It also features a fuse that I can easily upgrade to a larger amp size if the current one pops too soon. Any information you can give me about your power source, what kind of wire and where you got it, a variable POT (if needed), and just in general what you did would be helpful. Any links would also be cool. I'm guessing I'm looking at a stationary hot wire cutter for at least the wing foil, and maybe a hand tool hot wire cutter to cut out general body parts.

I'm also still a bit confused on the foam. Can you give me the exact name of the stuff you used from Lowes or Home Depot? I think I know what foam this is but want to be sure. Also, why not use the pink foam that Owens Corning (sp?) has up there? It is smoother and much stronger. My only guess is that the weight will be much more than the other?

I'll search the web for the hot wire cutter info as that's my first step. I just thought maybe you could point me quickly to a good source of info. Thanks.

critterhunter

Just read back over page one of this thread and refreshed my memory that you already gave a good overview of the foam cutting and some links so forget I asked. Still, looking at your cutter I just can't figure out how it works. I know, read the links...

Fisher

Critterhunter,

The hotwire cutter I made was the simplest design I could find. I just cut a 40" piece of Oak for a back and used thick ~1/4" music wire from my LHS to maintain tension. (Post #16 has a close up of the music wire install) The alligator clamps from the charger just clip on the base of the music wire and conduct to the hot wire. No fancy attachments needed. I tried several thicknesses and types of wire and heat settings until I found one that seemed to work well. What I ended up with was a standard car battery charger set on 12V 2 amp manual. When I set it on 12V 2 amp automatic no current comes through due to the resistance. This is way too much for the shorter 20" cutting bow I made next. I think a light dimmer installed ahead of the charger would help but I was able to do most of what I needed at high heat. Just went faster. I will try to post more photos. The wire I ended up with is a dark looking multi strand fishing leader. I really did not think that it would work well at all but the guys at the tackle store were quite nice and it only cost me $2 for 20' of it. It has worked quite well. It is ~16 gauge diameter with maybe 6 strands wound together. I let it heat up for a minute and wipe it down with a rag to get all the old foam residue off before I start a cut. I think that the key here is to be ready to try several wires and heat settings until you find something you like. Tried Nicrome wire and that was a waste of time. With any wire if you get it too hot you melt a big hole in the foam or too cool and it takes forever.

As for foam type. I really think the white foam sold at Lowes or Home Depot is best. It should all be EPS. Same stuff they make the insulated concrete forms out of. It is cheap. Very light weight and not very rigid without the plastic film they put on both sides. After building Foamflyer's plane and seeing how stable and stiff it ended up being with the Extreme strapping tape used as a spare and reinforcement on the booms I would stay with it. Looks like the other foams you mention would weigh about twice as much by volume as this stuff does. The advantage you have with making a larger plane would be the ability to strengthen it with carbon fiber elements.

If you are making the larger version of this plane first you should consider the wing as two separate pieces and join them later into the full length wing. Trying to cut a 5' long wing as one piece would be quite a chore I think. Maybe not. Two 2 1/2' wings joined together would be much easier. From what I can tell Faomflyer did not shape the bottom of the wing at all (neither did I). He also did not cut the trailing edge as thin as possible he left it about 1/8" to 1/4" thick.

Trial and error got me a hotwire cutter that worked. I also made a hand full of simple jigs to guide the wire when cutting the booms etc... I am not in love with hotwire cutting but it beats the @#$% out of cutting with a saw, drill or razor knife. Any method other than hotwire cutting makes a real mess to clean up. Spend the time to get these tools right. The cutting takes no time and since the foam is so cheap you can do a lot of testing. I spent less than $20 on foam to test my hotwire cutter, make 6 wings, build two whole planes and have enough material to assemble two more if I want. I spent a day or so re-reading all the different sites related to hotwire foam cutting until something made sense to me and was simple enough for me to make. I will try to post more photos.

critterhunter

Thanks and look forward to the photos. Still in the early stages of reading up on the hot wire cutters so only a little "makes sense" to me right now.

Fisher

Since you are going big I went small. Not sure if the BP 21 will be enough motor for this bird but all I can do is try.

Fisher

Here a couple of photos. The first one is the battery charger I am using. Again, I set it on 12V 2amp Manual for the 40!QUOT! bow. I set it lower for the 20!QUOT! bow. The second one is of the hotwire bow. I just connect the terminal clamps directly to the base of each music wire post. The posts have never heated up on me since the wire is so small in comparison. I ended up wrapping the music wire posts with electrical tape to I would not get bit if I touched them. The whole thing only takes 4 items to build. Piece of wood for the back, 2 - 9!QUOT! pieces of music wire and on piece of wire for the hotwire. All done. This is all detailed in one of the links posted in page 1 of this thread. Guess you got the charger photo twice for good measure.

critterhunter

Hey, thanks for the pictures and further info. Have only just begun the research on the hot wire cutter. Been a busy week with work and hunting. Just came back from goose hunting today. Eight shots and no birds fell. Like the small plane you made! You might not believe it but you could power and control that thing more than likely. I've seen some tiny ones around that size. One was a bi-plane...VERY cool. Guy said he had a ton of trouble keeping his eyes on it in flight. Will chime back in when I have more to say...And I will be building the big one first...540 motor and all. After that, I may build a dual 540 front prop version to further mimic a P38 or similar WWII bomber. You know, I was watching a WWII documentry on planes a few months back and I think England had a small dual boom pusher bomber. May be a nice plane to paint one after.

Fisher

Just finished another 1/2 hour flight with this plane. Man is it fun to fly. One thing I noticed was that the plane only wants to roll left. It is fine for flying but the right turn at low speed it slow. And a right roll is almost not possible. I have not noticed it before since I apparently turn left most of the time. I would go with dual ailerons for yours to give it full control.

Merry Christmas

Espresso-Outfitters

This is a really bright bunch of people in these forums, it's rare you see people use this script/web portal system for constructive purposes. Truck guy, I hear and feel for you with the repairs, I'm also an entrepreneur and work on my own cars, it's such a pain to have to drop everything just to work on someone elses engineering, then again, the number of miles on that truck, it sounds like my 69 ranchero, keeps on going and going and going, so work on it remains minimal, the 89 cougar, well, that was one repair after another, needless to say, it's now highly modified from the electronics to the door panels to work regardless of it's crappy engineering, I've learned how to fix things even the mechanics were dumbfounded with, luckily g/f has a new rig so I don't have to drop everything to work on hers as well.

The guy that created the plans for that plane, I hit his site, wow, this guy is just hard core, what a volume of work, he even pursues designs regardless of past failures, that's just the "right stuff" I've been looking for, I emailed him a proposition if he wants to turn his hobby into a full time job he can work from his operation, building rc planes on a commercial level, of which I'm focusing upon getting into next.

Good job on the progress, I'm a new believer of foam based construction, balsa and paper is indeed lighter, but when you are in experiemenal mode, 6 months on a project that has no hope because it's base design is hopless, being able to do it in foam in 6 hours is much easier to deal with. I'm currently using the plain, bumpy stock foam you get with the sheeting from home depot, I use the same material for crating up the espresso carts I build, so it's just using up scrap for the most part. Without even researching it, I noticed a guy built a geobat using it, so just used my jig saw, belt sander and sanding block to delve into it, am fine tuning the technique and am getting excellent results. It's just too cool to just sculpt this stuff, creating any shape you can imagine and not be limited to traditional balsa construction. Using the current technique, I use a 50-80 grit sanding belt to get the rough form complete, "sanding lightly to avoid gouging too far into the material" then finishing it off with 220 grit sandpaper, "sanding even more lightly" to produce a smooth, even surface, it works and is the poor man's approach to getting into working with this stuff without having to invest in much more then the raw materials.

I used to build 120 foot fiberglass luxury yachts many years ago, we used a fiberglass based foam to create new components/crossmembers/spars, etc. and that material was very itchy, but I gotta admit, must less temermental then the current housing insulation/styrofoam, so it's a trade off, I just love being able to buy a 4 x 8 foot sheet 2" material that can make up "many" planes for about 10.00. Running along that tangent, I'm now looking into everything foam based we have at our disposal, again looking at the commercial application since it's going to affect the production costs, but also have another idea which may advance this material forward for our application exclusively. PM me for more info in that area, I need to run an experiement to see if it can be done cost effectively, but if it works, we'll have a new foam that for all practical purposes, has little to no weight what so ever.

Fisher

Espresso-Outfitters

Glad to see another person interested in this plane. Foamflyer is definitely locked into the building aspect and your observations regarding the material and build times are right on. I never would have even started this build if I thought it would take months or even weeks. This foam is lite but works well with a little extreme strapping tape on it for rigidity. My $8.50 flyer does a good 50 mph and flies all day long on a couple of good batteries.

I have stayed with hot wire cutting rather than sawing and sanding since the hotwire does not make a mess. I am even considering building a CNC hotwire cutter. If you are going into mass production a CNC cutter is the only way to go. Are you building an airplane? If so, how are you shaping the wing airfoil?

And where is Critterhunter? He must still be recovering from the holidays. I expected to see some video of his giant scale plane in flight by now.

Cheer!

Espresso-Outfitters

I'm actually getting back to my roots building on the next one out of balsa, going to cover it in mylar, haven't tried the mylar before, should be interesting. I'm creating a universal fuselage so I can attach different wing and tail configurations to it, I'm reverse engineering the basic dimensions from my Cub J3 since that's the one I'm yanking the electronics from so wanted to make sure I'm not getting too far away from the norm on this one since I'm still learning how to fly RC correctly. The J3 I modified, I added too much fiberglass, so it threw off the weight, I thought the original designers allowed for a little leaweigh in this area, guess not. So, will post the progress, and the last photo of the J3 in tact you will ever see. RIP Cub........

[img]http://www.espresso-outfitters.com/discs/Image1.jpg[img]

Meanwhile, have a couple of discs I've been tinkering with in foam:

[link=http://www.espresso-outfitters.com/discs/disc1.html]disc1[/link]
Added a stabalizer on top of the rudder, not shown, it glides now

[link=http://www.espresso-outfitters.com/discs/disc2.html]disc2[/link]
Needs a rudder, but flies ok without it short distances.

I'm just winging it pardon the pun on the aerofoil's, since my background in the airplane field is largely freeflight, I was used to making the models politically correct to scale, finding out now the aerfoils in those were just overkill, and in fact, created more drag then lift, so am rethinking how I'm going about the future designs, which is why I'm reverse engineering the J3 since it was just an off the shelf prefabbed kit.

Good idea on the cnc, I haven't even started to get into finalizing the mass production element of it yet, still working on designs that are original, that, and in this case, making a trainer that can handle even a complete newbie flyer "me" so it stays together long enough to reach a point where I don't have to worry about destroying some elaborate design on it's maiden flight due to lack of experience.

critterhunter

Yes, I'm still alive. It's not the holidays that I'm recovering from....It was all the goose and duck hunting I did over the holidays. I love hunting and it's a great excuse to avoid the family and hunt with real friends. However, sitting out in the rain and high winds, taking long drives to certain spots, and eating whatever I can find stuffed under the seats of the car takes it's toll on you. I *might* have been in slightly better shape if I simply stayed home and hung around the relatives. Beyond that, I've been working like a mad man and now almost have all my work caught up since the two vehicles broke down and the bad weather which slowed me down. In fact, feeling pretty good right now as another day or two of work and I'll be completely caught up with my jobs. Hate being behind. Not only am I loosing money but it makes me feel like I'm in high school and way behind on homework.

So, back to the plane...Still parting together the hot wire cutter and yes I'll be building the 540 motor version first. Against my better judgement but since Fisher has beat me to any kind of pioneering the project with a BP21 motor and lipos [>:] I'll have to break new ground and do the 540 thing. After that I'll build the BP21 version at normal size. Then, if all goes really well with the first two, I may attempt a dual motor version with two 540s (or BP21s) in the front of the plane (tractor style rather than pusher style) to really mimic a P38. Honestly I haven't had much time to read over the foam cutter material but have some printed out and in my truck that I skim over as time allows. We've got a few months until spring so I've got time to blow the heads off a few more small critters, get another deer or two to take a nap in my freezer, and build this plane.

Once this plane is done I'm going to go deep diving on the net and see if I can't find another rare gem hidden in the dark corners of nowhere land. Much the same as how I found this one....At least it seemed like it was tucked away pretty good. I like the unique designs with character. Not the run of the mill 3D or Delta Wing. It has to jump out at me and say "this is not your dad's green Pinto". Will post what I find when that time comes.

Espresso-Outfitters

You fish as well critter? Believe it or not, I live in the middle of Tacoma Wa. and there is a nice set of bass ponds just up the street and a trout lake the other direction that's so full, it's not even sportsmenlike for an adult to fish it, you don't even leave town in both cases.......

I ran accross a toy that might fit the bill for you,

It's very much not daddy's pinto, hehe. the manufacturer states clearly that it flies well using some new fangled technique with the wing area.

I've been messing with the Geobat design and quickly put together the latest direction in foam, it's not fine tuned at all, but you gotta admit, it's not the typical looking design.


I'm fine tuning the direction I took with this one and will have something more presentable to show soon, will RC the final version in a larger scale using balsa/ply of course,. let me know what you think.

critterhunter

Pretty cool looking stuff! Yep, I fish. Even love ice fishing but we've had a thaw here recently and so I didn't get out on the ice while it was good. However, I'm sure things will freeze up again real soon. I do my hunting first and then when the seasons go out I start the ice fishing. As for summer fishing, a buddy of mine owns a 3 and 1/2 acre pond which I've manage for him. It was already 30 years old and had fish in it but I evaluated the population, took some fish out, stocked others, and now it's a well balanced pond that only I'm allowed to fish with a friend or two. We even installed a windmill aerator to improve the water quality. It's a dream come true for me. Perch, crappie, bluegill, bass, shellcrackers (redear sunfish). We also stocked some channel cats about four or five years ago and now they are getting in the 7 to 9 pound range. Haven't taken any of those out yet to eat as I want to fight some lunkers. He also allowed me to sink some wood and brush structure as the pond had almost nothing for cover to improve the ecosystem. Then there was the weed problem but stocking 20 white amurs (grass eaters) took care of the overpopulated weeds. It was also a killer place to duck and goose hunt but the house he's building on the property is almost done and his wife is a big animal rights freak. I'm hoping once she gets sick of stepping in goose droppings everyday she'll do the right thing and let me scare them away with my shot gun.