Well, I started this kit before I found this site...but first a little history. I was taking my son (who's almost two) to daycare and he spotted a yellow airplane flying pretty low. It was a crop duster and at first I thought it was real, we pulled into the parking lot of the park got out and made introductions and sure enough there were several RC planes on the deck. The group of guys for the most part are retired. My son and I hung out for about an hour before I took him to daycare, of course he wanted to get down and touch every "car car" (anything with wheels at this point is still a car to him) but I held him. Before I left the guys said if I were interested in flying they'd teach me. So on September 16, 08 I bought my first plane the Alpha 40, 3 weeks later I did my fist solo (thanks to my team of trainiers!) and shortly there after one of the guys sold me his BUSA E III kit out of his collection of kits. So with all that said I gave up saltwater tanks as a hobby after 5 years and now i'm HOOKED on this one!

I didn't find this site until after the build was started so what i'm going to do is post pics of slight changes i'm doing to the kit to make it a little more "scale". I'm also going to do the E III LF 70 scheme, just to be a little different and make the thread interesting. At this point i'm almost ready to attach the wing to the fuse. I will post pics of everything i do from this point on.

In the pics below you will see the rear fuse "framed". The instructions called for this to be covered with balsa sheets and I did infact do that, however; after reading several other threads and seeing pictures of the completed E III's in flight where changes had been made, I decided I wanted to see the structures under the fabric...to look more scale.

E. III LF 70

Considering using Solartex fabric in matte finish, however; the closest to purple is light blue...perhaps paint for that color?

Be aware that the yellowish/beige Solartex that most people use on EIII models comes in two version: Antique and Linen. The antique is semi-transparent so you'll see all the underlying structure which isn't so great if it's non-scale structure or wood where it's supposed to be open structure. The Linen Solartex is the same color but completely opaque.

I'd recommend that you cover the whole thing in Linen Solartex then paint the colors and markings with custom matched latex from the hardware shop. Then give that a final fuel-proof coating with Nelson's Flat Clear.

Don,

Good information as always...I will look into that suggestion!

Charles

Looks like you've got a great start !! Keep us posted through the complete build. Don't forget pics of the maiden if possible.. Good luck

Here's a must read thread for ideas on building the BUSA EIII.

http://www.angelfire.com/indie/aerostuff/eindeckero.htm

I look forward to reading your thread. I too started a build thread last year and am almost ready to finish mine. I should have already finished it but I got sidetracked by life. [8D]

Outdoorhunting: WILCO

Abufletcher: Thanks for the link...nice planes there. I liked all the different variations of the E III they had. I checked out the Nelsons website. They had a lot of colors to choose from. Even a variation of purple similar to the pics above. Do you have any experience with thier paints? http://www.nelsonhobby.com/paint.html


Dead Eyes: I was glad when I came across your thread. A bundle of information and tips. This being my first build I want to try several techniques that will be used on future scale planes (1/6). So the plan is to tweak it where it's practical for now, get her up flying, and make anymore changes between flights.

I may never use any other type of paint!!!! The ease of use (water cleanup and no smells) and dope-like finish makes Nelson's paints a no-brainer for WWI birds. The only reason I might use latex would be if a color I wanted wasn't available from Nelsons. That having been said, this paint does take a some relearning. It's best applied with a foam brush and essentially pressed into the fabric. Unlike other paints you can almost just keep brushing it over and over until it's almost dry. In fact, that's what I typically do. I slop it on for the first coat and then just keeping going over and over again with the brush in smooth even strokes. Brush marks are not much of a problem. Also you'll notice little bubbles forming that look awful but as you continue to brush and the paint dries, the bubbles disappear and you're left with a smooth flat finish.

Still, the easiest (and cheapest) way is probably to paint colors with latex and then seal it all with Nelson's flat clear.

Ok, after some further research I decided to remove the diagonal braces I placed on the sides of the fuse to make it more scale. I was bestowed some 1/4"x48" carbon fiber and i'm going to epoxy it to the two bottom 1/4"x1/4"x30" balsa strips. I will cut the carbon fiber in half, thereby having a 24" strip on each side for added strength. Reason behind this is to add support because A: I feel removing the diagonal braces will reduce the strength of that part of the plane. B: I probably should have used 4 spruce strips inplace of the 1/4"x1/4"x30" balsa strips since I removed the original fuse sides and since spruce is stronger. Overall reason...I want to prevent the rear end from breaking off in the event of a hard landing. I will be adding diagonal cross braces in the top sections of the rear fuse (make sense?).

To bring my pics up to speed...here is where I am at in my build.

I'm going to give Nelsons a try and they are here in Texas, so I won't have to wait long to recieve it

Looks great so far!

It'd be unwise to remove the (non-scale) balsa diagonals without replacing them with something else. It's not just a matter of "strength" but also lateral rigidity. That is, it's important that the tail can't twist. So just strengthening the longerons isn't enough.

One possibility would be to replace the single diagonals with crossed pieces of bamboo rod/skewers. Look for something about 1-2mm in diameter. Each individual piece doesn't have to be strong as it the net effect of having these cross-bracing pieces on every open frame (top, bottom, and sides). The thin bamboo will also look reasonably scale with backlite.

I've seen another builder here on RCU using kevlar threads to do the bracing and it looked very strong. I think I ended up using fine gauge music wire, which was probably not the ideal solution. But it looked good. I even wrapped bits of tape around the ends of each wire to give the effect of turnbuckles when seen in backlighting.

Spruce is too heavy and unnecessary for this application. The important thing is to keep the tail AS LIGHT AS POSSIBLE. As long as the longerons are HARD balsa, it should be fine. With (light) cross-bracing it will be virtually unbreakable and will probably even survive a crash intact.

As they say, build to fly. Don't build to crash.

Ok I have made some changes. It's amazing the amount of information I have found from old threads on E III builds. I went ahead and removed the diagonal braces I had in place on the sides with the intention of putting up some rigging. I also added carbon fiber strips for some extra strength. In the pictures you will see the carbon fiber strips used, the placement, trimming, and completion of the carbon fiber.

After doing the carbon fiber I tackled the rigging. I used 90# fishing leader wire for the rigging. I used a 1/16 drill bit to make holes in the top and bottom of each and every vertical balsa pieces (can't remember the technical name for them). I used my thumb and index finger as my "drill" there may have been an easier way, but I went with what I had and like the end results. Once the holes were made I then treaded the wire through the holes towards the rear of the plane and then worked my way back forward. I ran in to a problem though...how was I going to take the slack out? Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, so I made some "anchors" out of scrap 1/4X1/4 balsa. I drilled two holes in each anchor, worked the slack back towards the anchors, and threaded the anchors allowing some tension to be held and thereby getting rid of any noticeable slack. Once again I worked the length of the wire (one length of wire for each side) from one anchor to the other, rechecking for slack and using CA at all points where the wire came to a vertical balsa strip securing the wire in place. I think it looks pretty good and will show nicely through the fabric. I'm going to add tape to simulate the turnbuckle as Abufletcher suggested. Questions? Comments?

Looks great!

Here's a link to a very old thread that has some photo of the early stages of my EIII and also some photos of the outstanding scratch-build by "Trev."

http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/m_18...tm.htm#1813442

Here's another thread with some descriptions of my efforts at building the EIII maybe you'll find a useful idea or two:

http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/m_19...tm.htm#1915067

Abu, thanks for the links!

Looking good ! A flying buddy of mine just maidened his Eindecker. We plan on flying next season together at Warbird rallies. I scratchbuilt a dummy engine and so did he, however he one-upped me on his. So after I finish building my Eindecker I will probably redo my dummy engine . He also started his based on his using a 12.0z aluminum can for the center section with all the paint sanded off. Then instead of using 1/8 plywood cut out like I did , he used 1/2" dowel glued and screwed to the can to simulate the cyclinders with 1/2" spilt conduit covering the dowels. Of course he used one wire to simulate the pushod instead of the 2 I did. So the following picture is his. I'm so jealous

DeadEyes: It's pretty funny that you bring up the engines. By the way, be sure to post some video on your flight with your buddy! I was doing some searches and came across this scratch built DH-2 with a rotating engine. I thought is was photo-shopped and emailed the owner, Ian, and this is what he told me:

Hi Charles, my DH2 was scratch built by myself and Kevin Wesley, started back around 2000. It was drawn up using the Windsock Datafile. The motor is a Zenoah 62, with a 1.75 to 1 belt reduction drive and a 9.5" extension shaft to get the heavy bits infront of the CofG. It also allows it to swing a home made 30" x 14" scale propeller. The dummy motor does indeed rotate. It freewheels on a bearing off the propshaft. The dummy motor itself is made out of foam, blue foam for the crankcase and cast 2 part foam for the cylinders. The dummy motor is extremely light so doesn't load up the Zenoah much. Heres some pics

I posted the pics he sent me below. I may mold a Williams Bros. 1/6 scale engine and attempt to make a foam twin as the foam can be shaved to fit in the cowl and painted. I've also come across threads where plastic was turned to replicate the engine, however; it didn't rotate. First things first, I want to get access to several units so I can break them and try again...so that is the reason for me looking into molds. One of my side projects is to replicate something like that. I've been doing research on molds and foams, so we shall see! It just seems like it can be done.

Thats one of the many things about this hobby I enjoy. I love tinkering with things and just seeing what I can come up with and apply to my models. Of course I have alot to learn, but thats part of the fun of it. I would like to get a Wankel but thats out of my price range so I am putting a .91 OS FS instead.

Charles, I also thought about doing a rotating engine but decided that idea needed to wait a while. WWI era rotary engines spun at around 1,500-2,000 RPMs. In contrast, our model engines would be spinning a dummy engine at up to 10,000 RPMs. At that speed a dummy would just be spun to pieces.

So there seem to be two main solutions. One, as on Ian's stunning DH2, people use a belt reduction system allowing a larger (scale) prop and slower speeds. The other solution is to not have the dummy connected directly to the engine but instead to allow it to "pinwheel in the breeze." This would seem like the only possibility on an EIII.

Also, a note on the WB 1/6 scale Le Rhone kit. It is WAY undersized for a 1/6 scale EIII with a scale sized cowl. I'm not sure why. But the diameter is a good inch too small. Also, of course, it's a Le Rhone and not a Gnome/Oberursal engine. For my dummy I ended up heavily modifying one of the kits. I started by extending the length of each of the cylinders with styrene. Then I used the crankcase backplate for the front and then modified that to look more like the Oberursal. I also scratch-built new rocker heads and rods. I think there's a couple photos of it in the link I posted above.

Don: I've heard of someone seeing a rotating engine and they used the "pin wheel" method, meaning they had plastic fins between the cylinders that caused the dummy engine to rotate. I'm eventually going to give that method a try as well as the dummy engine rotating on a bearing of some sort while attached to a prop, of course that is a long way off. As of now i'm just going to build and make simple modifications to the E III.

I have a question for you...I saw your tail assembly as well as your tail skid (custom made?) and I love it! What is the proper term for that..."Full working______"? I want to use those applications on my kit as well. I read the threads, but didn't see any specific info on those (I don't think I missed it) and was wondering if you can offer a little guidance. Per BUSA plans the stabilzer would slide into the rear fuse, i'm assuming you trimmed the stabilzer in your application, from pics i've seen in the "Fokker Eindecker In Action" pub, as well as your pics below, it's not connected to the fuse the way it is per BUSA plans. I'm assuming you made the "mount" first and then went with modifying the tail feathers/rudder?

First of all, bear in mind that I didn't "modify" the BUSA structure but rather trashed it entirely and built a new fuse almost completely from scratch based on the Joseph Nieto technical drawings, which I had blown up to match the BUSA wingspan. I don't think I'd recommend this approach, particularly on a first model.

With this in mind, the rudder and stab/elevator on the EIII were referred to as "full-flying" meaning there was no stabilizer or fin as on the BUSA version. Doing a full-flying rudder would be a fairly straight-forward modification. The full-flying elevator is a bit more elaborate and also makes the model a bit harder to fly. Note that both the rudder and stab/elevator on the BUSA eindecker are considerably larger than scale. I also moved the wing position forward to it's scale location. You'll need to think hard about whether you want to mess with the aerodynamics of the model.

I think this is wise. You seem to have both the skills and desire to do serious scale building (and I welcome you to this teeny fraternity) but you might be better off just playing around with basic mods on the BUSA kit. You've already got a great start on that with your built-up fuse structure.

Thanks, the tail skid support is one of the characteristic features of the EIII so I wanted to replicate that. The basic structure is music wire in styrene tubing.

As I said, I completely scratch-built a new tail, elevator, and rudder and had to come up with my own mounting methods. The rudder is mounted on a modified tail wheel bracket. A music wire runs through the bracket, through a tube in the rudder and into the skid brackets below. The full-flying elevator is built around a central aluminum spar that slips through a styrene tube which was then attached to the rear of the fuse. I was probably naive in doing all this which was also my first RC build.