Hi everyone...
I recently finished an Adrian Page Gee Bee "Z" that I bought at a swap meet. It seemed the gentleman that sold it to me had bitten off more than he could chew. He told me for $50 I could have it. I was about 30%-40% framed, but not very well at all. I had to re build it from the cockpit back with all new wood and stringers. The vertical stab was canted about 10 degrees to the right and turned to the left a few degrees, it all had to go. Sorry to Adrian but I had to mod a few things, due to the damage, to get it to work for me.
I covered it in Ultracote, cutting the numbers out of the same, red pinstripe finished them off. It took me over 20 hours to cover but I'm pretty happy with the results. All the fiberglass was in the box, along with the decals and the radial engine, but the radial is really messed up and needs allot more work so I left it off for now. I plan on putting all the flying wires and braces on after I get the flying bugs out of it. The wheel pants are still all black because I was trying to meet a deadline for a scale meet here in town and ran out of time.
The first flight was a bit hectic to say the least. After getting the O.S. FL70 to run close to normal (don't ever let me buy one of those again) I taxied out and added power trying to keep the tail down. It rolled for about 75 feet and suddenly went straight up, I let off the elevator and the nose just went to level and flew on like nothing happened, kind of looked like a cartoon. The rest of the flight went fine. I realized I had too much elevator and not enough ailerons so I did some EPA for the next flight. It all went great, man is this plane fun to fly. The problems came when I tried to do what most planes call a landing. I'll just say I am O for two. No damage but I need to work on them a bit.
I plan on saving more headaches and replacing the FL70 with a Magnum 70 or a 46FX. In the meantime I'll finish scaling it out a bit more.
Thanks to Adrian for a really cool plane that keep me on my toes, and really draws the attention at the flying field. Between the Gee Bee and a TF Stinson Reliant a friend has, the ARF's don't even exist there.