Re: building a model airplane

It doesn't matter what kind of ply; lite or whatever. No .40 size aircraft is going to fly well with any more ply than it takes for the firewall and for the landing gear mount. Everything else needs to be balsa if the aircraft is going to be fun to fly. It's only when you get to the wing areas of giants that you can start substituting ply and other woods because with the larger wing areas, you can then allow slightly higher flying weight ratios.

MJC

This is a bit of a wild generalisation : Glens CAP is designed for a .53 and that is made mainly out of LightPly and it's had some very good reviews. See

for details.

Troll?

I wondered that myself, but hey, I've been asked *way* dumber questions than that......

MrBonk

Yeah, no problem. Just need a lot of flying skill. ;)

There was a Plywood Delta-wing kit around (SIG?) a while back. It looked a little like this one:

It was a triangle made of plywood (I think it was 1/8) with a plywood fuse (a long box) on top with the servos mounted on each side near the rear and the firewall/engine forward. There was a plywood tail fin sticking up out of the fuse little else.

It was not for beginners, since it was a real rocket (reportedly).

If A Coroplas PizzaBox plane can fly, a plywood plane should fly almost as well.

I'm making my planes out of Coroplas, it's a lot cheaper than plywood ;)

The Flair Cub is a long established sports/trainer model of which probably thousands have been sold since it's appearance on the market in the early 1990's. With the exception of a balsa longeron, some hardwood engine mounting bearers, balsa wing seat doublers, the birch ply firewall and the 1/64th ply front deck the entire fuselage, including the sides and all formers, is manufactured from 1/8th liteply.

The foam wing version has all of the wingtip sections manufactured from liteply and IIRC the built up wing version has all of the wing ribs cut from liteply. The tail surfaces are balsa.

The model is 72" span and has a wingloading of around 17oz/sq foot even when fitted with standard gear and covered in Solartex and flies beautifully on a very low powered .40 4 stroke.

Brian

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