The Super Strikemaster
Way back in the 1970’s, Midwest Products began kitting Jim Newman’s “Strikemaster”, a .40 size sport plane that according to their advertising “combined good looks with easy flight characteristics”.
I picked up one of these kits in 1973 as my 3rd airplane and it is still one of my favorites after all these years. Midwest stopped production in the 1980’s, so the only way to get one of these planes today is to scratch build it using RCM plans or by finding an old Midwest kit tucked away in the back of a hobby shop or, more recently, on R/C auction sites on the internet.
Peter Kelly from Whitehorse Yukon, Canada, contacted me about possibly scanning the construction details from my Midwest kit plans as he was building an RCM Strikemaster from scratch and he wanted to make sure he remembered the construction sequence. I sent him the construction sequence and we started talking about what a great flying aircraft the Strikemaster was. I told him I had acquired two of the Midwest kits over the years so he asked me about purchasing one of them. We agreed to a price and Pete soon had 2 stock Strikemasters under construction.
We started talking about some modifications that we thought would be fun to incorporate into our Strikemasters. These modification involved a lengthening of the wing span, incorporating flaps or flaperons and airbrakes. When we started talking about stuffing a .60 in the front (I had done this in the 80’s and it really kicked it up a notch) a light went off in both of our heads. Why not blow up the plans to 125% and just build a larger version of the aircraft. After emailing back and forth and numerous online chats we came to the conclusion that building the Super Strikemaster would be no more work than scratching out the original RCM .40 size plane.
So, We wanted to start this thread to document the construction of our Super Strikemaster prototypes #1 (Don Hatten) and #2 (Peter Kelly)
Hope you enjoy....if you need more info on the plane, contact Pete or I on this thread.