Scale Line Models Great Lakes Trainer Build
My mother bought this Scale Line Models Great Lakes Trainer kit as a gift for my father in 1962. It's been in the rafters since, and he asked me to build it for him, probably mostly for sentimental reasons.
I didn't want to mess up the kit, so I'm using the plans as a guide, updating a few construction techniques, and converting to electric. I shooting for an Eflite Power 32 on 3S, I figure that should be fine if I keep the weight around 5 to 6 pounds. It's mostly framed up and I need to finish up the wings, do all the alignments, and final stuff.
Some of the changes I've made are: re-engineered the firewall for electric, added 3 degrees downthrust, reduced dihedral to a more-scale 3.5 degrees, redesigned the empenage structure. Speaking of empanage, the tail is about 10% bigger than scale, as was standard practice back in the day. If I was doing it over, I'd cut it to scale size, but it's too late for that now.
I redesigned the interplant strut attachment. And the wings were designed to be attached with rubber-bands so I redesigned for bolts. I'm using 50 pound test spiderwire to attach all the music wire to the fuse.
I plan to cover with orange solartex with black paint. Oh, and my mother planned ahead enough to buy an optional fiberglass cowl for it. Who would have thought she knew about such things back then……