Well, I decided to delve into scratchbuilding RC planes after learning some great techniques from Experimental Airlines and others on Youtube. Ed from EA has great techniques on how to build true airfoils from Dollartree foamboard as well as fuselage tubes. By spending just a few bucks on Dollartree foam, hot glue, and packing tape, you can have a complete air frame that will accept your normal electronics. The Dollartree foam is easy to embed your servos as well as cut out control surfaces for your ailerons, elevator, and rudder.
One of the great things about scratchbuilding that I love, is you can recyle and piece together planes from electronics and parts from multiple other planes. It is a great learning experience as well when you truly see how your placement, CG, airframe and other components affect the flight characteristics of your plane.
The first version of my "Fatboy" RC plane I built or V1 as I will refer to it here, I didn't cover the wing or fuselage with packing tape. I first wanted to see how well i could do with forming out the parts of the airframe before diving into the other aspects.
It was actually surprisingly easy to make the wing and the fuselage tubes for the plane as you can see from the videos on Youtube. I purely guessed on the placement of the wing and other components in my V1 plane and definitely had adjustments to make. I didn't configure any landing gear or other hardware to the underside of the fuselage as this was meant to be a hand launcher. However, with a huge snowstorm that came on Christmas night and the next day, I just had to configure some skis on my V1 plane to have fun in the snow. Take a look at the PIC I snapped with my phone fo the plane with the skis mounted.
I don't have any flight footage of this plane as I have since decomissioned it after the air frame got quite wet in all the snow flying I was doing especially since I didn't have the foam board covered with tape. I have since built a V2 version of this same plane with similar dimensions and hope to get a post and more details with pics up on the site soon.
