I am starting a new fiberglass project that will involve plug construction, molding the plug and pulling parts from my molds. Over the next few months I will do weekly postings to act as a basic tutorial for fiberglass molding. That being said, this represents my initial post.

I have made many things out of fiberglass over the years. Typically, my projects involve building a plug, making a mold from that plug and finally using that mold to make pieces.

One project that I have wanted to do for a while was inspired by a ceiling fan that I first saw years ago. I am sure that you have seen the fans that look like the nose of a WW II fighter plane. From the moment that I saw that fan, I thought that it would be cool to have a helicopter body that would hang from the underside of the ceiling fan making the fan blades look like rotor blades. Of course the helicopter would have to be a classic – I chose the UH-1 from the Vietnam era.

Thus the project begins. The first thing I like to do when I am building something like this is to go to the hobby store and pick up a model of the helicopter that I want to build. I use this model as a three dimensional reference. While 3D references are not always available, I do like to use them when possible. For this project, I selected a 1/35 scale UH-1. Using this model, I can get a good idea of the size that the fuselage has to be relative to the diameter of the fan blades in order to maintain a scale appearance.

I began to build the fuselage of the model and began to analyze the proportions, angles and curves of the copter. See the photo of the fuselage below.