Hey all I'm thinking about doing something really stupid like building a model from scratch. I've been watching quit a few posts on RCScaleBuilder.com so I have some ideas on building, and jigging, 3-views, scaling.... (though they are probably "half baked").

WWII fighters just need to be built, that's all there is to it. But I have had such great fun with my Yak-3 because I seem to be the only one in my area with one. I have always loved Russian WWII fighters. Unfortunately, many of the most beautiful ones, though with un-matched performance when first appearing, were simply no match to the german aircraft at the beginning of the conflict on the Eastern Front. Of course as we all know, by the end of the conflict with Yak-3s roaming the sky's below 20,000' and La-5s and 7s above, the lauftwaffe had meet its match by the end. Especially when you consider the numbers of aircraft rolling out of good old Mother Russia by 1945. Over 50,000 Russian fighters were built by the end.

The Yak-3 although lightly armed when compared to a 109 or 190 (1x20mm + 2x12.7mm), by the end was averaging one kill for every 37 rounds fired!

Without a doubt, simple in design and high in performance, no one can under estimate the value of these aircraft. Unfortunately, very few of these russian birds of prey are modeled.

So a focus on a long term project (boy won't my wife love this one LOL) I picked a canidate for building. Now, I don't have a CAD program, but I do have scaled 3-Views with sections. I know the airfoils used and have a program to layout the ribs for the wings and stabalizers. I am also a software/system engineer with experience in the high tech world that has given me another stupid idea.

In the Software community we have software programs that do incredible things but they are licensed as Open Source. What that means for you average web browsers out there, is that the software doesn't belong to anyone specifically, it belongs to all!

What you say, "Does this have anything to do with aircraft modeling"? We'll every time I think about building a plane from plans, their $30-$100+ and then there is all of the other stuff like cowls, canopies, artwork....

So, though my media might not be ideal for sharing this model plan, I would love to have it function as an Open Source project. I will provide anything that I do, you can take, but give back. Help me along, help me design, maybe even build components that we can share amongst the community at a cost bases. I mean I have built a couple of fiberglass cowls before, I don't know why they need to cost $75. So if I build a cowel mold and someone in the build community needs it, then cost + shipping. May be someone else will build the Canopy Form and someone else does graphics, or migrates files to a CAD program.

So here is a couple of hours worth of work and the subject of the start of my next long term project. The PDF is printed tiled (90 pages). I will post a single "BIG" pdf and the Visio drawing (what I have currently) somewhere tomorrow where they can be downloaded.