A few months ago (has it really been that long?) my friend z0r from Necrosoft.nl pointed me to Mikey’s RC. At this site you can get several building plans for scratch build polystyrene RC aircraft. So I bought some polystyrene foam boards and put them aside and did nothing with them at all.

So finally, after some months, I decided that it was time to actually start building a plane. I already printed the plans for the F117 pusher prop jet, so I cut it out, taped the parts together and taped that onto one of the foam boards.

After which I cut out the wing.

Then I did the same for the fuselage.

And the tail fins.

The plans point out that the fuselage has to be reinforced by small bbq skewers, but that looks a little to flimsy for my taste. So I decided to do it slighly different. Instead of bbq skewers I cut out a small board and with incisions to fit the fuselage into and glued that together.

While this is drying up I went to cutting of the aelevons from the wing. These parts are called aelevons, because they are a mix between ailerons and the elevator. This plane doesn’t have separate ailerons and elevator.

Now it is really important that the aelevons will be attached in a way that is both strong and durable and flexible. There are several ways to accomplish this, but I think it’s best to take a whole lot of tape, cut it into small pieces (I used 16 pieces of tape for each aelevon) and stick them together in reversed pairs. This method gives you pieces of tape that are sticky on top on one side and sticky on the bottom on the other side. Like this.

Then you can stick the tape pieces on the aelevon like this.

Notice how I attached the tape pieces that are on the bottom to the top. This ensures that they don’t get stuck between the wing and the aelevon, but it’s quite a pain to get them back to the other side once the other tape pieces are stuck to the wing.

After I attached both aelevons to the wing I cut out the hole for the motor and prop. On this picture you can also see how the aelevons are now attached to the wing.

The last picture for today is a mockup shot of the wing with the fuselage on top and the motor mount (which is nothing more than a square piece of foam) at the hole for the motor.

Next time we eat an airplane!