I got a wild idea to bash a J-3 cub kit into a PA-24 Pawnee ag plane. I know that the Pawnee was a development of the Super Cub but a change to the rudder shape and the addition of flaps would fix that. Has anyone tried that recently? Everyone has a cub or two but the pawnee is not a common model. It does not look like it would be impossable. In fact it looks like it could be done pretty easily. Any thoughts? I've had a Great Planes .40 Cub kit gathering dust for a while and think I might like to give this a try.

Save the time, money, and frustration. Build it from scratch. The PA-25 is an awesome bird, a so is he PA-18, but for this project, I'd get the scale PA-28 cowl and build back from there. Thats just IMO.

You are probably right. But I live so far from a LHS that getting all the stuff for a scratch build would be a drag. Plus the fact that I dont' have all the tools I would need to cut a "kit" from plans. And the plans might be difficult to come by. I saw a giant Pawnee kit in the Buy & Sell section but I just dont' have 450 bucks for that, plus an engine to lift a 30 pound plane. I do have the kit, several motors and most of the other stuff required to build it. I even have a line on a PA-28 cowl in 1/6 th scale.

It was just a wild hair.

The cub is a high winged plane, whereby the "AG" illustrated is low wing. Wouldn't that present a challenge to kit bash?

DaveB

DaveB, Not really. You need to move the wing mounting blocks to the bottom of the fuselage and cut the fuselage sides to match the rib outline. I think the hard part would be lengthening the fuselage forward of the wing and balancing the plane. The Pawnee has a longer nose than a cub or Super Cub. The GP Cubs have balsa fuselage sides with inner ply reinforcements so once the cutouts were made the wing would mount just like any other low wing plane. The gear would have to be mounted in the wing because of the way the wing is mounted. I need to pull the plans out and see exactly what kind of cutting would be required.
I was hopping that someone here had already done this bash and could help me with the detailes.

I took a SuperCub 3 view and came up with this. A line was drawn from the cowl to the turtle back. the wing was move down to the belly and a cockpit added. A little whiteout and viola, a Pawnee. I just might try this on the plans and see how tough it really is. It wont' be "scale" but then neither is the kit I have.