Now thats cheating! With the excellent kit parts and your way excellent wood working evident I guess its OK to go with foam cores .( I assume it is a full kit for your "Blue Angel"build. another question any planed finish technique for the wing yet ?

I have the wing tip and root tracing from Ron’s kit so I could have projected the ribs and do the built up wing but the foam wing will be a lot stronger and lighter.

I plan to MonoKote the wing so it will be covered with light 1/16” balsa glued on with Southern’s Sorghum contact cement. The center section will be glassed and painted with MonoKote paint. The process results in a very light and strong wing.

When I do painted wings I glue the 1/16” balsa on the wings with epoxy otherwise the balsa seams will eventually show through the finish but that is not a problem when using MonoKote.

Actually Richard if you read through the entire thread, Mike is building this Blue Angel from scratch using a copy of plans from an original kit. How's your Tiger Tail coming along?

THEY ARE HERE!!!!

Awesome work by Tony Howard!

HI J P ::Its coming out nice was just out in back with the wing doing a finish sand before fiberglasing the center section followed by a piece of Sig Ultra lite glass top and bottom . The fuselage is getting prepped for final coat of "Klass Kote"brand 2 part epoxy primer--sprayed--primer before paint. Well this is a "Blue Angel thread and a GREAT one[8D]

I could hardly wait to do some rough cutting of the canopy and trial fitting. I somehow avoided cutting my fingers in my excitement! It is really looking like a Blue Angel now!

The canopy started out as a flat .030 sheet of special high impact strength PET-G made by Vivak. It is tough as nails! I put some 15% nitro fuel in the cupped area of a scrap piece and it has absolutely no affect on the plastic.

To be continued…

Here's the pdf on the material: http://www.sheffieldplastics.com/web...8SHF_VI_DS.pdf
This is one tough canopy.

Great nose-job![sm=thumbup.gif]

More checking the shape of the nose pieces under the canopy before gluing.

To be continued…

Gluing the nose blocks that are located under the canopy.

To be continued…

After the glue was set I did a lot of sanding to shape the nose and the area under the canopy. I need to do more trimming on the canopy now that the wood is taking shape.

In these views the fuselage is just sitting on the uncovered wing cores and they are missing 1 ¾” on the trailing edge, ¼” on the leading edge, and of course the wing tips.

To be continued…

The horizontal stab tips were glued on, planed and sanded to shape.

To be continued…

I feel so unworthy when I see the quality of your work. It is truly art in balsa.

John

All it takes is patience and time to build up your skills. 8178 has been building and designing models for 40 years. Heck when his "Cold Duck" hit the magazine stands in 1970, I was only 10 years old. Didn't get an interest in modeling until 1974 with my first issue of American Aircraft Modeler. Bob Violett's shrike was featured in the issue. Still have the plans, yellowed after 33 years (that went fast). A someday project.

jlingrel, thank you very much for the wonderful comment, but jpurcha is right, building is mostly a learned skill. It just takes time. Plus everything always looks better in pictures!

I started building rubber powered free flight and powered control line at a very young age in the late 40s. There was an older kid in the neighborhood that built beautiful airplanes and he got me interested in building my first kit, a rubber powered kit.

Sometimes learning building skills is painful. My first kit was a Comet brand stick and tissue free flight. I got it all built and was really proud and excited that I was able to even build it. I rushed over to my friends’ house all excited……. and he bluntly told me that it looked like dog do do! What a let down and disappointment that was. I was crushed! It’s funny that I still remember his name and that experience, but I kept on building and have always tried to be supportive of other builders and their work.

Most all of the kids in the neighborhood built kits in those days and later on control line stuff with engines that didn’t start very well. Building and flying was every kid’s passion then, kind of like video games are today. After awhile my building skills improved and my airplanes looked much better. There were some wonderful kits in production back then. My best friend had a pretty decent allowance because his dad was the head manager of one of our local paper mills. He built what seemed like a monster size RC aircraft with a vacuum tube radio. After building it he was afraid to fly it, but I was very impressed with it. The cost of RC was way, way out of my reach but the idea stuck. Most of us kept building and flying control line until we were in high school and got distracted with girl friends.

I started building control line again in 65 after getting married and settling down to family life. Within a couple of months I got interested in RC and it became one of my passions. I was very interested in designing and building my own aircraft. I played around with a lot of ideas. Some worked great and some not so good. See the attached image below of one of my early pattern designs that worked pretty well. It was powered by a Supertiger 40 and had a swept wing and tail. This is all probably TMI but I wanted to share, that from my experience, there is a learning process and I’m still learning.

I love to build and most of all love to fly what I build. Others on the forum have tried to explain the “build-fly” phenomenon and the feeling that many RCers have. I’m one of those people that still have the need to build what they fly! I don’t feel much attachment to the aircraft I’m flying unless I spent the time to create it. RCers often say they would like to build but cannot find the time it takes. True, we are all much busier nowadays making our livings so my solution is to build a little bit at a time, taking many months to complete a build. Meanwhile I have other aircraft to fly. There are lots of days when you cannot fly because of the weather, etc. Those are great opportunities to spend a little time building your dream machine.

8178, I have been at this since the 50s, but military duty and military contracting has taken me away from the hobby for up to 5 years at a time. I am a builder at heart, have tried an ARF, but found little joy from it. Flew OK, but no feeling of accomplishment from it. Keep building and doing the build threads, I am incorporating a lot of your ideas in a Super Kaos I am currently building.

John

I’m glad you find the build information helpful. Keep on building!

The original Blue Angel did not use a completely round plywood nose ring because it had to be thick to support the front of the original wood beams for the engine mount. The thickness of a round nose ring would have made it difficult to shape the fuselage to the ring and keep it round to match up with the spinner.

I elected to use a thinner round nose ring to pull and glue the front of the fuselage together and to give a rough guide the build up of the front of the fuselage. But because of the sharp angle of the fuselage line as it curves to the nose I added a second 1/32” thick nose ring that was slightly larger than the spinner back plate. I cutout the fuselage so I could install the engine on the mount and put the 1/32” nose ring on behind the spinner. I then moved the 1/32 nose ring around behind the spinner until it was exactly centered, and then spot glued it from behind to the thicker nose ring. I then removed the engine and glued the ring all the way around on the outside and on the inside of the ring. This process left a small gap between the balsa and the nose ring that needed a little filler. I’m going to be glassing the fuselage with fiberglass cloth and polyester resin so I mixed up a small amount of resin with micro-balloons and filled in the gap. After it setup I sanded it smooth.

There is not much prop clearance with the 12 -10 prop but I only fly off tarmac.

To be continued…

I just noticed in some of the images the canopy do not look clear. It is clear, but there must be something about the plastic that messes up the camera at certain angles.

if you want it to look like glass you can always spray tha canopy with Future floor wax

Excellent tip. Ive done that many times. Its amazing what a liquid acrylic can do for the shine on a canopy Helps protect it a bit too.

The bird is looking awesome !

We would appreciate some teeth showing when the blue angel is complete after a successful test flight.

Roger that wingman! But I don’t want to build too fast, I’m savoring every minute.

My aileron stock arrived from Dynamic Balsa today and it looks good!

After giving more thought to the single aileron servo used in the original Blue Angel, I decided to add a second servo and move them out in the wing to reduce aileron flexing. I’m using Futaba digital S9252 servos so the second servo added $75.00 to the project. I really didn’t want to spend more money on the project but with the piped OS 61 SF ABC-P engine this Blue Angel will be flying much faster than the original and I don’t want to take a chance on aileron flutter.

To be continued…

The engine was positioned on the mount with the required spinner back plate clearance and the mount scribed for the engine mounting holes. The engine mount was drilled and taped with a 6 - 32 tap.

The clearance for the pump lines on the back of the engine are pretty close so I added a little more gap between the front of the nose and the spinner back plate. The clearance is a little over 1/16” and I usually like to have it less than 1/16”.

I laid the fuselage over the plans to check the header and tuned pipe fit and it looks great. Macs must have made this pipe header for the Blue Angel. The pipe will fit neatly and tightly up under the wing and fuselage perfectly.

View of the engine bolted to the mount, the pipe header and the view of the nose without the spinner.

To be continued…