In a shameless bout of plagarism, I am working on a 40 sized VE (54" span, 56" long, 540sqin area). In the absence of real design info, I have been working from pics of Nat Penton's VE, Richard Lewis's VE and Andre's 65" version. This is mostly OK and I am fine with the TLAR method for this, but I want to know if there are any really crucial design elements I need to get right? Anything like location of the vertical fins relative to CofG, etc. The rest is just basic design and I can handle that well enough...

Thanks,
Mark

Sounds awesome, just a thought, you could get the plans from Richard or Nat and then reduce them with a good copier.

I like your idea, Nats planes always are an attention getter, with performance

I would recommend that you go to mark website and order the plans.. i think they are avaiable, this would help you trmendously.

Good luck.

Chuck

Thanks for the replies, gentlemen. If I wanted a 2M version, I would just buy Richard's plans. There is no sense in recreating the wheel, after all. But I want a slightly different animal with a more "square" layout (length ~ span), similar to the 65" version Andre built. He does not have any plans for that one, though, and no intentions of producing plans. So, I am doing one myself. Keeps me out of trouble, if nothing else... And I don't want to simply copy the dimensions from previous work, I would like a better understanding of how much and where, etc. to get this design to work properly. Being an engineer, I have a problem doing something "just because" without an understanding of why I am doing it that way. Old habits die hard, I guess.


Thanks,
Mark