I've been looking at the idea of converting a Freewing 80mm A-10 EDF to a single turbine for couple of years. I recently sold my last giant scale jet and am looking forward to playing with smaller jets that I can more easily move around and don't cost so much. I recently found a FW A-10 PNP NIB for a great price and jumped on it. Inspiration and techniques came from several sources. Thanks to my friend Keith for advice and encouragement with 3D CAD and pipe fabrication, Michael B. for actually doing one, flying it, and posting his photos on FB, and Paul A for sharing his foamy conversion ideas and expertise on YouTube videos. I shamelessly used and copied their ideas plus added a few of my own.

The jet is still a work in progress but the hard parts are done. Photos below are to show current progress and overall idea. After getting the jet out of the box and studying the rear end layout I took the approach to just fit the turbine and pipe in the tail where I thought it needed to go and then rebuild the airplane around it as needed. This required removing the square carbon tube backbone of the EDF fuse, gutting all the foam from the center of the forward and aft fuse, and removing the center section of both stab spars.

This is the most complex conversion I have done so far. Clearly, doing a twin turbine conversion would be lots easier, but where's the challenge with that? Plus the cost is double and you only get one airplane instead of two. As I was cutting the stab spars I thought, this is not for the "faint at heart" if you are not able to do some scratch building to put the airframe back together. Anyway, this is for your info only and will be a step by step of how I did it. As of now, it has not been started or flown. Results are TBD. Comments and recommendations are welcome as always.
Thanks,
Gary


After working mostly on the rear end this is the first time I put the wings on just to see how it looked overall. Pipe is barely visible from this angle


Pipe hidden from here


Barely visible here. All turbine air enters through the scale engine nacelle intakes


Not too bad from the rear


Engine nacelle mount is the turbine hatch and turbine air all comes through the scale nacelle intakes and is ducted to the turbine inside the nacelle pylons.