foodstick

A good friend of Mine has always been a builder/flyer. He has leaned towards more user friendly builds of straight forward sport planes. While he has never had a problem building straight or nice planes , he also had never built anything over the top with nice detail. Quite a few local guys have been building 1/4 WW1 birds the last few years, and finally my friend picked the SE5a. He has shuffled his feet at times, and told me I am not gonna get that carried away with the build . I know he will regret not at least doing a little extra, so sometimes it just takes a gentle nudge, or maybe a trick he didn't know about ..and suddenly he is moving ahead on the build.

He has been sending me some pics lately, and I am just blown away. I have helped a lot of my friends with fairly easy painted weathered paint jobs. Painted over Ceconite covering...Many people sort of freeze up on that first attempt until they can see how its done. I will be helping him paint this plane, but the details he is adding before the paint are just incredible for a first time WW1 builder. I am looking at my planes and feeling humble...

Anyhow, he is not one to post ,but he won't care if I share these pics..

foodstick

foodstick

WacoNut

Very nice.
Tell him he is doing great.
Anthony

foodstick

Gray Beard

My Feedback: (-1)

WOW!!!!

CanDo

Fantastic! Probably my favorite WWI plane. Don't stop building!

foodstick

Well my buddy sent over some more pictures of his scratch built parts, he is on a roll !

The gun is entirely from scratch, I believe he is not going to go crazy on gun detail as it is so hidden under the hood of the plane. Also pictures of the exhaust mounts which look great, I believe the outer wing struts are also built a little differently than the ones shown in the kit? unsure on that. Anyhow enjoy his pics...

foodstick

Couple new pics

foodstick

oops, double post,

Well I might add my buddy has this big red and white dog that was an ACCIDENT involving two customers dogs
"The experimental crossbreeding happened at his vets office!"
So we decided to do a dog cartoon on his plane for his scheme. I am going to draw it up and paint it for him, pretty simple.. maybe with some goggles on the dog..

foodstick

I told my friend it would be cool to paint his dog Toby on the plane as his mascot,
so I drew one up, then painted it on the plane for him. We ALMOST placed it to low ... it would be hidden by the exhaust badly if any lower, luckily it only covers his chin up some...

jeffEE

My Feedback: (5)

All that work......just to be shot down in flames by your Fokkers! He does nice work.

foodstick

Well, he told me he had taken an afternoon off , and thought maybe I will work on the site for the gun and the windshield.. about 8 hours later he realized the day was gone, and he had this to show for it ...

foodstick

The plane gets bigger, the room gets smaller !

foodstick

Did some rib tape and weathering tonight on the wings, they still need some chalk work before the clear.

foodstick

My buddy had a show and tell for a bunch of winter locked fliers the other night, here are a couple pics of his SE5a mocked up for the get together.
Oh by the way those wheels were bought on an old buggy of some sort at a goodwill. He paid 5 bucks for the buggy, and it had EIGHT of these wheels on it. he covered the big plastic spokes on the wheels with the same Ceconite he covered the plane with.

foodstick

A couple of pilot pics...

Cliffc

Very Nice plane thanks for sharing.  Regards,  Cliffc

foodstick

A new pic, plane is still waiting for its maiden...

spyder62

 He did a great job and should fly as good as it looks.

rich

mattnew

My Feedback: (2)

amazing work....

foodstick

Well we got skunked a second time on the test flight. Its been range problems on the ground test, and now on a second try it was a throttle servo that gets erratic once the plane is running. (this is different problem than the first test. My buddy is going to try a new throttle servo first, and see what happens. I wondered if the first night the strange interference issue could have burnt up the throttle servo while we messed with the airplane.

My friend has even gone so far as switching from jr to Spektrum setups to see if that fixed everything...

We don't THINK its a problem with signal feeding back into the receiver area since he is using 2.4 technology, and ONLY the throttle is affected.. but we are still looking so who knows. There is no metal control rod on the throttle, I think he hasn't made any obvious mistakes that drove the 72 mhz radios crazy...

I have been lucky to typically avoid issues like this, and I don't see any obvious reasons he is having trouble.
One thing is for sure.. it makes you real nervous about test flying with open ended problems like these.

CanDo

FYI, a friend had range and throttle problems on a new gas powered plane. It turned out he put a cheap servo on the throttle. When he replaced it with a better quality servo, his range and erratic throttle problems went away. Good luck!

vertical grimmace

My Feedback: (1)

What engine? I had a bunch of trouble with my stock G38 plug cap. I was getting a bunch of interference from it arcing. Once I replaced that, it was fine. ( I pulled my hair out pinpointing it though.)

It seems that with the modern RCxcel caps that come with so many of the new Gas engines now, that would not be an issue.

No doubt that these things are a real drag. You have all of this time and thought into the details of the build, and you can't fly because of some minute trivial detail. I made sure my aircraft got a good range check even using FM, then I switched it back to 2.4 and have never had a problem. It has been said that 2.4 can mask an RFI issue. I have no way to use FM anymore, as I sold off all of my FM, PCM RX'ers.

This was the aircraft I had the trouble with, so I can say that I feel your pain. Not something you want to lose to a sill RFI issue.

The MacDaddy

My Feedback: (10)

I'd like to see how you mounted the rudder/elevator/throttle servos and radio gear...... pics would be great.

Mac