RE: Sterling Spitfire
Hi Chris,
Looking forward to seeing your completed P-63 and also hearing a pilot report. The local hotshot I knew in the 1960's said his King Cobra flew great. By the time I met him he was flying a highly modified Kwik Fly, making low inverted passes, then pushing upward and doing outside snaps starting at about 5 feet all with a 10 channel Orbit reed radio ! At that time the King Cobra was so far out of my league skill-wise that I didn't even consider building one. But all these years I've been thinking .......
Yes, the big airplanes consume a lot of time. The Robin that's almost ready to cover is a model J-1, which has the Wright J6-5 engine. The other Robin is OX-5 powered. Cessna 120/140 airplanes seem to remain pretty cheap compared to most other types. I've never understood that, as they're good little airplanes. One of the local guys at Santa Maria recently bought a 140 off eBay (sight unseen, no less) for about $18K. I've seen the plane and it is airworthy, but not exactly a show stopper.
As far as R/C radios and engines, I'm not a glutton for punishment. The F3F will have a Saito 50 and modern radio. Those old radios were a disaster when they were new and I doubt they improved with age. The F3F has numerous mods to make it more scale-like scale dihedral, bolted on wings, etc.
One interesting thing about the Spitfire. It has the same positive incidence in both wing and stab as does the P-63. I have the original George Harris magazine construction article stored away in a box, but haven't dug it out to see if the prototype used the same angles. One of my friends has a Sterling P-51 kit, so I'll have to look at his plan to see if it has similar incidence angles. I still wonder why they did that. Maybe it was a hold over from when all radio models had lots of incidence in the wing and they simply raised the stabilizer LE for faster models rather than reducing wing incidence. Or, maybe as somebody said before, they wanted the model to fly with the fuselage nosed down a bit to make it look like it was going faster.
Dick