About a year ago I purchased a large collection of RC stuff which included a few dozen airplanes. After I got rid of them all I had an assortment of mismatched parts sitting in my garage, so I recently pulled some out and stuck them together to see if I could make something fly.
I assembled a plane using the following:
Never-been-used fuselage from a Midwest Aerostar trainer, poorly covered in grubby yellow fabric; landing gear out of my junk drawer; four of Tom Runge's old Ace servos that I still had lying around; brand new fin and stabilizer from a Thunder Tiger electric glider kit that had been damaged and thrown away at Ace a few years back; very nicely made but somewhat old and shabby wing from a Pietenpol Sky Scout which nicely matched the size of the airplane.
I epoxied the firewall, installed a trusty OS 40 FP, and took it out to the flying field. Unfortunately I closed my van door on the stabilizer, turning it into a bunch of broken sticks. That stabilizer seemed a bit too small anyway... So I made a new one out of a slab of balsa and covered it with about ten different colors of monokote scraps. The plane looks a bit funny because the Pietenpol wing is undercambered and doesn't really match the wing saddle, and it has that little door in the trailing edge to allow the pilot to get into the cockpit without bumping his head. But I rubberbanded it on and gave it a try.
This is one of the ugliest planes in the entire world, but believe it or not, it flies great! That undercambered wing makes the plane pop up off the ground as if it's being sucked up by a vacuum cleaner. I would say that this was a very successful project.
About ten years ago a crash left me with an undamaged pair of wings, which I rubberbanded onto a crappy ARF trainer fuselage that a guy had given me. I had to put in a new firewall because my friend had broken it off along with the nosegear and fuselage bottom all the way back to the main gear in a wreck. That Frankenplane was a great flyer, too. I put a little door in the bottom for dropping soda cans, rotten bananas and golf balls. Unfortunately radio interference turned it into a mangled mass of splinters long ago...
I love these cobbled together planes because I never worry about damaging them. They are already ugly and can't get much worse. I've only done two of them, though...
Anybody else here ever put together one of these frankenstein airplanes? It's a great way to make something good come from a crash.