hi everyone

i keep tripping over the old plank and was considering selling it, but it was in a bit of a state and i dont know if i could ever part with it after it put up with many of my noobish crash-landings and bellyflops.

so i got to work gutting it of its engine, fuel tank, servos and everything else until there was just the empty skin of an aeroplane staring at me, i got to work peeling back the covering but it had sustained a bit more damage than i had first thought, the various repairs i had patched up previously were showing up like scabs and the covering was torn, wrinkled and looking rather sorry for itself.

it seems that during many of my dead-stick lawndarts into the hard-packed dirt field opposite the landing strip (many times ripping the tailwheel off the back) the aft end of the fuselage had sustained a fair amount of damage and was held together mostly with scrap balsa and CA, i cut back to fresh wood and completely re-constructed the back end until i was happy with it (i also cleaned up the badly repaired holes in the fuselage whilst i was at it)

im almost done removing all the covering (will it show through the new covering if i left a few patches of old red on the wood?) so im happy(ish) with what ive done so far, and next week i will be taking a trip to the LHS to get new covering, but im not too sure what color scheme to use, i have some scraps of red, white and black left over in my box of odd bits and pieces so if you could post some pics of your covering jobs so i can get a general idea of what i want it to look like that would be great


Pics:

You are getting into one of the best parts of this hobby. Taking a so-so plane and making it better. I did this with a weathered Carl Goldberg Cub and was able to sell it for more than I paid for it when I was done. And got to fly it of course too. Now if you calculated my pay rate for the profit on the plane it would be in the neighborhood of a penny/ hour but the education was priceless.

its not the selling on that im looking forward to..

ever since i was a littlen i was taking things apart and forgetting how they go back together, the whole process of taking an aeroplane apart piece by piece, stripping it down to the bare frame and rebuilding it all by myself gives me a kind of thrill, not to mention you learn so much about how its constructed and how it flys

i would really like to put it on floats but i have nowere to fly it off water

Here's a 25 year old Super Sporster my neighbor built from a kit. He was going to toss it and I talked him into letting me rebuild it. The name on the cowl was made on an inkjet printer using water-slide decal paper. The yellow dingy is the before shot. LOL Note the red fiberglass/duct tape repair on the nose.

Well, first of all you could quit calling it a "plank". That term is used by heli guys that are trying to degrade plane guys.

Ken

i like the simple (yet effective) color scheme on the sportster, will make it nice and easy to see in the sky aswell as being easy to apply (im still a beginner and this will be my first covering job BTW)

and furthermore, Ken, how are you to know that i have not started playing with helis? ive always fancied driving a whirlygig around the sky

That was my first and only covering job.

Nothing wrong with flying a heli. But I'm just saying that when you are asking plane guys for help it might be best to start of by not using terms that are considered derogatory or a put down.

Ken

Well, that's debatable

C'mon. Heli's don't fly. They are just so ugly the earth repels them

I have a Hirobo Shuttle and can't figure the dang thing out[:@]

What I think is funny is the way a heli crashes. When a plane crashes it's usually just "boom" and it lies there in pile. But when a heli crashes it flops around on the ground like a chicken with it's head cut off!!!

Ken

And this has WHAT to do with covering a plane?????[>:][>:][>:][>:][>:]

ive sorted out the general patterns for my covering job but still not too sure about the colors... any ideas?

Exact colors are totally up to you, but make sure they are contrasting - Good definition between light and dark

For example, Light Blue, Yellow and White are a poor choice

So are Red and Dark Blue

Mix a light color like white, yellow or light blue or green with a dark color like Red, Blue, Purple, etc

Ahhhh helicopter crashes. I think it if funny how when I’m looking at a piece of scrap metal and they say yep that is defiantly a over tightened rod and there are guys 50 feet away looking for pieces. That blows me away.

Yellows are really easy to see in the sky in my opinion. They are for me anyhow. Like Minnflyer says, use something contrasting like a blue, purple or black along with it. Whatever you do, don't put the same pattern on the top and bottom. On my planes I like to either leave the bottom a solid color and do trim on the top only or I make the bottom an easily distinguishable pattern like stripes or checks. Here's my Super Sportster fuselage in Yellow, metallic plum and platinum:

A few shots. The white PT-60 is my current trainer. The blue and yellow one was my first kit.

Funniest crash I ever saw was a heli. Main rotor struck the boom during a loop and it just started flopping and flailing all the way to the ground. Parts flying everywhere on the way down. Even the owner was laughing it looked so odd.

Oh yeah, this is a covering thread. Uhhhh, don't cover a heli.

ya that would look weird. But to the topic I have never had a covering job but do patch up my repairs and hate it. I will get better but for now it is going to be an arf. Hopefully you will do well with yours and not look like mine.

Hmm...

ive just stripped it down a bit further and i think there is more to this aircraft than i was told...

when i bought it, the man in the pub told me it had only just been built (actually, he was from RC-extreme, but thats another story), but now ive taken off the white covering, ive found evidence that the fuselage and wings have been previously covered in blue and red, and all along the tailplane there are CA hinges that have been cut off (someone has put new hinges on, and just cut the old ones off instead of pulling them out) and theres also some holes in the internal formers which look asthough they once housed control rods... methink me were sold a lemon :P

ah well, it still got me through my A certificate, Solo and has got me part way towards my B certificate

as for the color scheme, im sticking to a simple 2-color scheme, either Dark green fuselage and wings with orange wingtips and orange stripes across the wings and a long line of orange arrows under the fuselage (so i can get a general idea of the planes attitude and direction)

so similar colors to the one in RCkens avitar but with different patterns

Foamy,
The colors in my avatar might want to be avoided by newer pilots. While yellow is a great color for visibility, black can be an absolute killer. Planes that are covered in black can be hard to see the details of. The plane just becomes a "spot" in the air. It's definitely not impossible to fly a black plane, but it can be difficult. The color combo that I have found to be the most visible is red and yellow.

Ken

Black? it looks dark green to me :S

i want to keep away from the commonly used colors (like white and red, often used alot on most trainers Today) not that there is anything wrong with those colors i just want to set my plane apart from all the others

Also... im having trouble scrapeing every last bit of covering off, will it show through if i left a few stubborn patches on there?

There is a reason why they are "commonly used" colors. That is because they are the easiest to see. There are tons of problems with colors like silver, black, grey, or any of the less used colors. While it's not impossible to see the plane in flight, it is more difficult and a lot easier to get into trouble and lose your plane.

More than likely. Plus, the new covering will not adhere as well to those "patches" and will be more likely to pull off in flight.

Ken

Here's one that caught me short and I didn't even cover it. Sometime back I flew the Phoenix Models SU-31. Actually had three in a row I liked them so much. Beautiful bright yellow plane, easy to spot anywhere right?? Well while flying my third one on a cloudy day, I came in for an approach to landing. Now our field is surrounded completely with trees. As the plane came down off of the right end of the runway and dropped below the tops of the evergreens it dawned on me, and the then gathered crowd, that everything on the front of this plane was dark red which immediately turned to black and for about 5 seconds I had no idea where my plane was. Everyone was looking for it and someone finally shouted "There it is" and pointed. I did manage to get it down safely but only flew it on sunny days after that. If all of your lead edges are a dark color adn you fly the plane towards you under the wrong conditions, you aren't going to see it. Like Ken says, black is hard to spot.

I'll second not using red and dark blue! My King Kobra is covered with these colors on the wing and part of the fuselage. During rolling maneuvers and some vertical maneuvers the plane can disappear when flying with a dark overcast. A plane doing 90+ mph in level flight only compounds this.

Hogflyer