abufletcher

My two ABSOLUTE REQUIREMENTS for any WWI model: 1) 100% scale accurate outlines on fuselage, wings, tail, undercarriage, etc. and 2) NO monokote. The only aspect of #1 in which I'm willing to admit some limited degree of compromise is in the airfoil...but even there I remain convinced that a scale airfoil will fly just fine.

I've gotten to the point, that if a kit doesn't have scale outlines, it's not even worth my building time. Unfortunately, there probably aren't more than a dozen or so WWI kits available in any scale (for IC engines) that qualify. At times the lack of scale outlines seems like simple sloppy ignorance...as if the designer just sort of "sketched the outlines from memory." Other more conscious "design changes" reflect perhaps outdated ideas of model design, one example, IMHO, is enlarging the rudder on WWI models. It's been my experience that a scale-sized rudder flies just fine...and seeing a "ping-pong paddle" attached to the end of, for example, a DrI or EIII makes me see red. As far as non-scale undercarriages go (typically too short and too wide), if you can't take-off and land with scale gear you shouldn't be flying WWI.

Telemaster Sales UK

Moving house tomorrow. Staying at my mate's place for a few days then I'm off to La Belle France. Still lots of packing to be done so I'll bid farewell for now and see you all againe once I'm settled on the other side.

abufletcher

Au revoir!

rowarrior

hey TFF, too bad i dont live close by. i would pick it up in a NY minute LOL. Do you have a picture of the plane?

Abu, i admire your attention to detail. I still use monokote on everything, but yes, i would never pick up a kit, ARF, or anything that was noticeably different from the real thing. WWI RC planes dont fly very nicely compared with their sport counterparts, but that is part of the charm in my very humble oponion. People that fly WWI birds know that those planes have quirks and that it is challenging to take off and land them in 1 piece, but that is why makes them so irresistible to me !

Stay in touch Telemaster!!!!

Jaybird

I guess I'll have to take all my pictures off this thread then, sorry. BUSA does a pretty sloppy job of designing kits.

Jaybird

rowarrior

hey Jaybird, I hope you dont say it on my account, i actually had the Maxford Nieuport 17 in mind as it resembles a Beechcraft 17 staggerwing http://www.maxfordusa.com/nieuport-17ep60arf-1.aspx
your nieuport I loved! thats why i said if you get bored with it, it would gladly give it a new home

on the other hand, i dont know if you say it as a joke, I think BUSA has good planes. I love my Busa MC1

Jaybird

No, not on your account, but the BUSA kits are so far from scale in all the aspects that abu is referring to that I figured they would be too offensive.

Jaybird

rowarrior

Hi Jay,

well, i can only speak for couple of BUSA kits I know, but to be honest, they are not obviously distorted like the N17 which link I posted, which has indeed a ping pong paddle for a rudder! On that same note...Maxford's Bristol Fighter is very appealing to me though! LOL

abufletcher

I'm not a fan of the BUSA kits, but the Flair kits are no better (and perhaps even worse). By that I mean that they are fine kits per se but most are "fun-scale" at best. My dislike for the BUSA kits started at the very beginning of my building when I ordered an "eindecker" kit as my first ever RC build. I was shocked and disappointed that not a SINGLE aspect of the design matched the Fokker EIII. The fuselage was wrong (in so many ways), the wings were wrong, the elevator and rudder were wrong, the undercarriage was wrong. Since I was so inexperienced in RC building and hadn't yet even soloed, I decided to keep the wing with its fat airfoil and ailerons (though I did cut the one piece design in half and mount the halves in the scale position). But I chucked the rest of the kit in disgust and went on to build my EIII from scratch based on the Joseph Nieto technical drawings.

The fact is that I can spot most BUSA models a mile off at the flying field. And that shouldn't be the case. If a model is a nice scale model, it shouldn't be immediately obvious who's the manufacturer. (Of course we DO know that if we see a really nicely scale 1/3 DrI it's almost certainly a GTM kit because Glenn's the only one making such a kit.)

As for monokote....JUST SAY NO! Starting tomorrow order yourself a roll of "natural" Solartex and never look back.

abufletcher

I find it ironic, BTW, that the Aerodrome RC site is chock-full of dozens of very nicely scale WWI offerings in smaller sizes, mostly for electric motors. Most have very good scale outlines. So what do those guys know that the IC designers don't? If the guys at Aerodrome RC can offer a really scale 66" Fokker EIII with full-flying elevator and (scale size) rudder, why can't other kit makers do the same?

http://www.aerodromerc.com/

abufletcher

That Maxford is at least as scale as my Flair "Legionnaire." I was just desperate for any WWI flyer at the time and the Flair kit was cheap and readily available. The only real "mod" I made was creating an UC of scale height and width...no point learning to fly a WWI model on "training wheels." In the case of my Flair "Puppeteer," as ridiculous as it seems, I hadn't yet flown a single biplane at the time I was building my Sopwith Snipe...and I started to get a little nervous about that. So I bought the Flair kit, built it in a single month, adding an undercarriage of the same height and width as the Snipe, and started practicing. I should also admit that the vast majority of my "Sunday flying" time is done with ARFs, whatever happens to be the cheapest, semi-scale model available when I wear out the previous one. Currently that's a Cub-like $170 Paulistinha P-56. Flying Cub-like models is very similar in many respects to WWI flying. If I didn't have these cheap ARFs available, I'd be more tempted by the 1/6 scale BUSA kits. Also since I'm in Japan, those BUSA kits are no longer cheap once you include shipping to Japan.

Jaybird, actually the BUSA N28 is one of their better offerings and yours looked quite nice! I don't know the N28 as well as some other WWI aircraft. What would you say are the main deviations on the BUSA N28?

Jaybird

The alignement of the elevator and rudder hinge lines are offset on the full scale and on both BUSA 1/6 and 1/4 kits they are in line for ease of construction I assume. I extended the fuselage 3/4" to move the vertical stab and rudder back. The tailskid wire mounts to a large flat plate on the bottom and the kit would have you leave it that way with the wire and nylon clamps exposed. I built up the area around the clamps and wire and made a smaller flat panel for just the tailskid to pass thru. The kit also just supplies a formed wire for the skid so I surrounded it with basswood and lite ply pieces. The airfoils are not correct of course and neither is the traditional BUSA aileron construction with the beveled leading edge and top hinge location. The kit interplane strut mounting is big tabs that stick up from the wing and the struts are flat bass wood. I changed mine to threaded inserts and blind nuts in the wing panels and reused the wooden airstream struts from a Top Flite Dave Platt 1/6 SE5a kit I crashed. The landing gear is wrong and there is no good way to incorporate an articulated spreader bar. The cabane struts should be airfoil shaped as well but are soldered wire. The kit would have you add bass wood to the leading and training edges. Other than that it's great! None of the modifications I've made make it 100% accurate, just less offensive to my eyes anyway. My camouflage scheme is not accurate at all, but it is mostly Solortex. I used what I had on hand.

Jaybird

TFF

The DR7 and D8 of BUSA are the close lookers by eyeing, at least by BUSA standards. The DR1 and the Pup are pretty horrible.

abufletcher

Sounds like it isn't that far off and your mods made it better. Still, it is my firm belief that a model can be both simple to construct and have scale outlines at the same time.

In regards to that ubiquitous fat BUSA airfoil, the obvious reason for that has nothing to do with lift but is intended to create wings that don't need rigging. But, hey, rigging is part and parcel of WWI modeling. One reason DrI and DVII (and DVIII) models are probably so popular is that they also avoid rigging. BTW, I've heard of people cutting down those fat ribs (to perhaps half their width) and still having a fine-flying model so clearly a scale(-ish) airfoil will do the job. The fat airfoil also makes the beveled ailerons look wrong. With a thinner airfoil the bevel isn't as obvious. Another solution is to top mount the ailerons (put the hinge on the top surface) with a sloping aileron LE.

But you know, why should we have to fight with a kit to make it look scale?

abufletcher

I agree. And I think both the DVII and DVIII were later designs. Also both and sort of naturally shaped like the standard BUSA design, e.g. fat airfoil, no rigging, long-nose (in the case of the DVII) and good size tail surfaces.

Oh, that BUSA's new 1/3 scale Albatros DV is a real looker. And why shouldn't it be considering who designed it.

http://shop.balsausa.com/product_p/433.htm

abufletcher

The 1/4 scale DH4 is also not bad but needs to have the airfoil trimmed down:

http://shop.balsausa.com/product_p/402.htm

Jaybird

"The fat airfoil also makes the beveled ailerons look wrong. With a thinner airfoil the bevel isn't as obvious. Another solution is to top mount the ailerons (put the hinge on the top surface) with a sloping aileron LE."


That's what I meant when I was talking about the BUSA ailerons. They are top hinged with a sloping LE. I used Robart pin hinges rather than the kit supplied Du-Bro nylon hinges for the ailerons. The tail surfaces were too thin in my opinion to use the Robart hinges. I didn't feel like trying to fight with it and make up scale hinges.

If only someone would make a kit like this.....

Jaybird

rowarrior

I agree, the N28 looks very nice!!! I will try the Solartex, I will ask the guys at the local hobby shop. I've been doing it wrong all these years! LOL

FireBee

My Feedback: (34)

Did someone say Jasta 6? Here is my Ron Weiss plans built up 1/3 scale. As EV-184/17. I saw two fly at Ohio Dawn Patrol and I built mine in 63 days to fly at our own Mid Atlantic Dawn Patrol. 40 lbs, Zenoahh G -62, xoar Axiel prop. Wing is scale with 3mm oak veneer and stained in 4 colors like the real one. Due to time limitation I chose to paint the fuse as If it were my kite and o I used the Navy Seal logo, trident, and blue fuse to honor those fine men.

Flying this Fokker is different from all my other Great War planes. You only touch rudder twice. One on take-off to hold heading. Once on landing. So you work the rudder to maintain heading. You must fly it with ailerons. did I say you must fly it with ailerons just like a WW-2. How do I know this? I started a stall turn to the left as I added rudder it snapped into a right hand spin about 1/2 way through. Scared me to death.

Landing, kinda fast, land on the mains. But you have to just keep it on the mains and just hold heading and et it roll out until the tail drops on its own and do not try to turn around until it stops. We happened to have a full scale replica fly that same weekend. My god he took 1500 ft or more roll out to a stop, then turned to back taxi.

Flying /landing advise I pass on from Stuka Barry who helped me last year as he has flown his for 15+ years. His is the Red D-VIII in left background. Now I fly it with confidence. What a great hobby.


ROWarrior, Love your Orig video. Also your D VIII video. Suggestions to improve you D-VIII . Love the Rossi engines. Had many.
i would add 45-48% expo (-neg on Futaba) on your elevator to soften the throw near the middle I would also consider adding 2 oz lead under the cowl. Appears to me as very sensitive.
It took me a few flights to get used to the soft expo but now it's so easy to grease in landings.

abufletcher

While I would love to see more of these "scale-inside-and-out" WWI kits (there can't be more than a half dozen available), I understand that they would be beyond the price range of most modelers (including me) and perhaps even above the skill level of most builders. So here's what I would like to see designers of reasonably priced WWI kits do instead:

1. Start with a 100% correct scale outline...an outline that would pass any scale competition judging with flying colors.

2. Pick a reasonably scale airfoil, fat is OK for those aircraft which had cantilever wings but thinner for any aircraft that requires rigging (if the aircraft has functional rigging, the model should have functional rigging).

3. Now "fill-in" that scale outline with whatever model structure you prefer.

It's really just a matter of requiring designers to "color inside the lines."

FireBee

My Feedback: (34)

If only someone would make a kit like this.....

Jaybird[/QUOTE]
Take a look at Proctor kit for the N-28C1. It's is almost an exact copy of the real airplane construction including a scarf joint of the fuse lonegerons as per full scale. Ailerons are hinged and use the same torque tube control mechanism as full scale. All servos completely hidden an lots of accurate brass fittings to hold struts etc. rigging wires required to hold structure together and locks it all in place. I broke a strut after 8 years of flying. That was a fun landing.!

Airfoilis is very thin and true under cambered. Yet I can fly inverted as long as I want. Covering is solartex. and you will love that material for covering. Easy to strip into rib stitch covering too and accepts all kinds of paint, Rustolum, latex house, or model master which I used on this paint scheme. This is a 1/4 scale of Maj Raul Lufbury, number 2, 94th Aero Squadron. May 1918 . Last pic my Proctor, mine with a BUSA ahead of it (#12). I have since added #2 (white with black shadow) to the top wing.

this is my best flying Great War airplane. Flew it 2 weeks ago in 8-10 gusting to 16 iknots and a solid performer with full aerobatics.
L

FireBee

My Feedback: (34)

I'm very happy with my BUSA Pup. Of course adding all the scale detail is also fun.

abufletcher

Nice detail work!

And +1 on the Proctor N28.

jwrich

My Feedback: (17)

Balsa USA kits has always been a stand off scale kits. They are designed to fly and reasonably priced. With a little work, you can make them into a fine representative of the scale airplane. Many of the BUSA kits built on the various forums has attested to this fact. It all comes down to what you want to build and fly, also your building skills. I suggest you read some of the building threads on this and other forums, RC Scale Builder. com has many examples of beautifully modified Balsa USA kits. I agree, Proctor kit are the bench mark of scale models, specifically WW I aircraft.

Rich

Tmoth4

My Feedback: (1)

To me, the 1/3 scale BUSA Pup looks more accurate than the 1/4 scale one does.

Mike, I love the detailing you did on yours.

However, I did so much modifying on my BUSA 1/3 scale N-28 (narrower LG, thinned airfoil, deeper and wider rear fuselage, re-shaped rudder, sheeted tail surfaces, etc....etc. that I thought I could have almost done one from scratch just as easily!) BTW, the plane flew fantastic with the thinner wing section and the ground handling was no problem at all with the narrower gear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjCTUmUtqSs

Jim