I have no clue on the skill level it takes to build a plane from plans. How much does it cost to build a plane from plans.?(NOT including motor, and electronics.) And what kind of skill level does it take? I have my own shop with tons of equipment and i have access to wood. I also have expereince in woodworking but i dont think that will help with plans. Any help will be great, thanks.
Thanks!!!

If you can do a few simple things like accurately measure, use a hobby knife, use a bandsaw, etc. building from plans isn't all that hard. While I've only done it a few times, I've found that some designs are easier than others and some plans are better than others. If you have a few kits under your belt and are able to think your way out of a problem, you should do fine.

As far as cost, I'd say it is at least as expensive as the average kit once you factor in buying the plans, the wood, the hardware, and so on. the cool thing is being able to have something not available as a kit or ARF.

Here are a few places to buy plans:
www.modelairplanenews.com
www.rcmmagazine.com
eBay

I'd suggest something simple like a Stik, Hots or profile plane for your first attempt then move up from there.

If you've done wood working before, then you have a good start. The most important thing in scratch building is learning to be patient. You have to know when to slow down and pay close attention. Accuracy is very important, and that comes from experience and patients. You will make mistakes, so learn from them and don't get discouraged when something doesn't go right. Just step back, reevaluate the situation, develop a plan to move forward and keep plugging away at it.

If you buy your wood in bulk then the cost is not that expensive, and much less generally than a kit. Where you will see the expense rise is the hardware, and this is because you can select what you want. You'll find you end up getting the higher end hardware a kit won't come close to matching.

In some respects, scratch building is easier than a kit since you control all the quality of materials, hardware and parts fit your self. You generally (at least I do) make your own kit by cutting out all the wood parts before hand and building up sub-kits: wing, fuselage and empenage. From there it's just like building a regular kit. But in the end you'll have a lot more pride and there is nothing like seeing a model you cut all the pieces out and built your self take flight for the first time.

Go spend some time in the kit built and scratch built forums. There is wealth of information to be learned there which will greatly help avoiding some mistakes.

Hogflyer

A point not covered so far, get an accurate copy of your plans. This will be the one you sacrifice for making parts. If you have several parts of the same shape, make a template from this ply, plastic, etc and us that to trace you parts. With the one per plane parts, just cut out the part from the plan copy and stick it on the balsa or ply and cut the part out. I use the 3M Super 77 spray and just mist the back of the plan and then stick it on the wood. Cut and sand to the outside of the lines and when it is finished, you can then pull the paper off the wood and it will not leave any residual adheasive.

Select all the parts that are of one type wood and thickness and stick down the paper parts to get maximum use from your wood. Make sure the grain runs per the plan. With Lite Ply, the strong direction is usually across the surface grain vs along it. Standard aircraft ply the strong direction is along the grain.

From this point on, you are building a kit. As pointed out before, the big difference is you can select the wood and the hardware.

Go for it. Scratch building kind of gets under your skin. You'll love it.

Don

it's not really that complicate. If you had wood work experience it'll go a long ways.

As state the grain of the wood must be facing in the proper direction.

Also the types of wood for types of parts. Birch for the spar. you can even use dowls for the leading edge

It's probably better if you get a kit first. This way you'll have a general idea of how an R/C plane is built.
Different ways to mount shear web

It'll cuase you more to build now a day than to buy an arf.
But if you crash it...you'll know how to repair it and have all the tools, left over covering. And you'll know where the weak pionts
of models are at.

Right around $150-$200 depending what kit and covering material for a .40-.60 just for the model, glue, heat gun, iron...ect.

it's even more expensive if you scratch build if you don't know what parts to order....not so much for the wood, but all those trips you'll make to the LHS
for those nik nak parts that'll add up.

Skill level?
You have to have some basic idea of how an airplane is built because alot of plans don't tell you basics like servo mounting, linkage hookup, routing wiring through a wing, mounting the engine, ect... and some plans don't really give you the best way of doing certain parts of a build, knowing that comes with experience, so don't start with the biggest baddest plans you can get.
If you have built a kit before and have fair woodworking skills it shouldn't be a problem.

You need patience. Measure twice, cut once.

All plans are not created equal: some go into great detail about equipment placements and such, others leave more for the builder to figure out.

You will probably be cutting a lot of balsa wood which is much softer than most other woods. You need to treat it a bit different from stuff like maple or birch.

Trial by fire?

It's a learning experience for sure. As Missleman mentioned, there are items not covered by the plans that you will need to figure out or have prior knowledge of. Building a few kits first would help you build this knowledge or simply asking folks. Don't let that intimidate you though.

There are a lot of free plans out there as well that you can download and print using CAD file viewers. Some folks have printed plans to .pdf as well for ease of viewing/printing. Print them out, tape the sheets together to create your plans and build.

You will see there are different properties to balsa(weight, rigidity, density) as well and can be more choosy with making your material selections if you order balsa since you choose what sheets your parts will come from. I order mine from National Balsa Co. It was an eye opener to see two 1/4"x1/4"x36" pieces of balsa next to eachother where one literally weighed twice as much as the other. You can select your stock to shave grams and build light.

"Don't find one way to save an ounce, find twenty ways to save a gram." - good mantra.

It's cool seeing a plane you build take flight... I think it's that much more cool to see a plane you scratch built from plans to take flight. I'm just finishing a profile plane from plans. Nothing too involved but scratch built from plans nonetheless. I can see where folks say that scratch building grows on you.

somegeek

speaking of free PDF plans here is a whole load of them:
http://plans.aerofred.com/cat2.htm?s...1ed082979a1c78

Forgot to add... about printing your own plans, you can print out extra sheets for those areas containing templates for ribs and such and just cut them out to trace. No need to adhere these to your balsa in my opinion. Just pin in place and trace out with a felt tip pen or soft lead pencil.

somegeek

Wow - great plans link!

I am sensing an order to National Balsa soon... Hmm...

somegeek

The most fun I have is flying a plane called "not for Sale" built from plans.

Almost all my own planes are built from plans but I have too many kits behind me to count anymore. All plans built planes are just kits you have cut out yourself and almost no instructions. I buy A lot of plans from MAN and some of the older magazines plans service and they have A print out of the building article that came in that issue. Sometimes that's A lot of help and sometimes none at all.
Wood and glues are cheap but the covering starts running into money if it's A big plane. I never thought of the control linkages as anything high dollar but I also have A lot of it just sitting around in the shop. I figure about half the price of A GOOD kit to build from plans.. My 80 inch Sukhoi ran me about one fifty to build. Go look at 27% ARFs and see what they would cost. Sometimes an ARF is cheaper then one of my scratch built planes and more often then not they are cheaper then A kit built plane. One of the many reasons they have taken over the market.

I find the easiest way to get started is take the first day and cut all of the parts out, make a kit. I have glued a copy of the template to the wood, but most of the time I trace the part to poster board and then trace around these to the wood. As far as cost, it is pretty cheap to build from scratch because you are paying the labor rate to cut out a kit.

There are a number of ways to translate from plan to wood parts. I am not a fan of tracing, mainly because I've not mastered the technique. I've tried using carbon paper between the wood and plan and tracing through that way, but aligning the parts on the wood when you can't see where you are putting them caused me to abandon this method.

I then went to making a copy and cutting up the copy to glue down. A couple problems can come up using this method as sometimes the master will skew or slip going through the big coppiers and the result can be that parts of the copy are distorted. You usually find this out when the part doesn't fit well. One other issue was which side of the line do you cut to? A lot of the drawings use very wide lines at times and it is easy to stray from one side of the line to the other when cutting. After sanding things smooth, you end up with an undersized part.

My method now is to use a CAD program, I use Rhino 3d, and copy a portion of the plan to a JPG file. I the use that file as walpaper on a blank drawing and use points along the edge of the line to define a curve which is the outline of the part. Rhino allows me to smooth or fair the lines to remove any misplacements of the dots and get a nice smooth outline. I then scale this drawing to the exact size needed. Now I have a part I can print, or even better yet use a tiles to layout a full sheet of wood. Once I have the parts positioned on the wood, I can the print out the drawing and glue it to a sheet of wood for cutting. The line printed in this manner is razor thin. I cut on the band saw and make sure to leave a bit of stock outside the line. I then use the disk sander and sand exactly to the line. My first time using this method hooked me for life. A stack of ribs cut in this manor, when stacked together look as if they were laser cut. There was no final sanding to get them all to the same shape.

I now use a variation of this to make copies of parts from a kit. Here I make a copy from the punchout scrap. IE for the 4*60, being laser cut, they make a very good source for reproducing parts for crash repair. I aquired a 4*60 a while back that someone had started building the wing and run into problems and abandoned the kit. They had glued the two wing halfs together with a major twist and had poorly glassed them together. I skinned the glass off using a heat gun and then sawed the wing in half at the joint. In the process of doing this, I destroyed the two root ribs. I use the scrap wood for those ribs and my Cad method and reproduced those ribs. The finished ribs were an exact match for the destroyed ones.

The first photo is of the scanned 4*60 W1 Rib for use as the wallpaper
The second is of the rib read to be scaled to size
The third is of a set of quicke 500 ribs layed on a 3x36" sheet
The last is a portion of the print out of that sheet for gluing to the balsa for cutting. My printer will print banners and I use a roll feed that allows me to print the full 36" length. I try to lay out two sheets of balsa at a time to save paper (the roll stuff is expensive)

Just one more way to go from plans to wood. The great thing about this is it is now an easy job to scale up or down. Just change the size in the drawings are change the cutouts for spars and such to stock size and away you go.

By the way, there was a linke posted recently on another subject for a free CAD program. I haven't tried it but reports I've seen on other machinest sites are favorable.

Added***
This is the links from the other forum.. Like I said, I have not used it so you are on you own here.

free manual here:
http://www.al-ki.com/tcad/download.php
or here:
ftp://ftp.imsisoft.com/download/turb...deToTurboCADv4.
pdf

free TurboCAD here:
www.freecad.com/files/TCAD_LE_setup_files.exe

Are you saying you spent $780 for Rhino 3D Cad program? I have to find a different way to do it.

I did, but not for my models. It just works out that it was good for models also. I also did it in two steps. I first got a student version and then when Rel 4 came out, I did an upgrade. My total cost was somewhat less thant the $780 and spread over two "payments" a couple years apart.

The cost is why I posted the link for the free CAD program. I havent tried the free one. I did try a couple other CAD programs before I settled on Rhino. It was the first one I could half understand on first use, well maybe 10%, but it was way better than any of the others.

Don

WOW!!!
Thanks. I thought that it would sound alot harder. Thanks for the posts and all the links.

MAX

If you copy the plans at Kinko you can put the master over the copy, hold it up to the light or on A window and double check that the copy is at 100% of the master. If not have them make up another set. One day I had them do it three times because the new operator of the machine didn't know how to set it correctly. They may not like it but they have always done it. That's why I use there service.
That thing about cutting or sanding to the inside or outside of the thick lines has been something I have always wondered about. In my case I just choose how I want to do it and stick with that way all the way through the kit building stage and it always works out well.
Have fun with it, that's what building is about.

Here's a link to the RCU cad forum http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/foru...smode_1/tt.htm which includes some free programs and plans. Take a look before giving up. Don't expect high-end features but functional. Also watch for distortion in your plots.

I use a flatbed scanner to scan sections of the plan and print cutting patterns with my computer's printer. Then I temporarily tack glue the cutting pattern to the wood and cut out the part using either a scroll saw or disk sander or both, doing a coarse cut with the saw and doing the final shaping with the sander.

Photostatic (Xerox) copies and laser prints can be transfered to the wood by putting the paper with the picture down on the wood and then heating the back of the paper with a covering iron or by dampening the back of the paper with acetone.

There are plans for all ranges of skill levels. Start simple and work your way up. My first plan built plane was a Cox .049 powered Bee Tween designed by Randy Randolf. I don't think it took longer than a week to build.