A few years ago RC Modeler published an article about one of their founding editors, Don Dewey. I think he had died just recently. To commemorate his contributions to RC and to RC Modeler magazine, they offered the plans to one of his early designs, the Royal Coachman trainer, free of charge. Then they had a contest and offered a prize for the best Royal Coachman built by a reader. I had never thought seriously about ordering this particular plan but I couldn't pass them up when they were free. I never got around to building the plane until this week.
It's a pretty simple design. I put the fuselage together in about an hour, and the rest of it looks like it will go together in a similarly quick fashion. I'm using it to teach my kids a few things about model airplane construction.
Did any of you folks get the free plans when they were being offered? Did you enter the contest? They said in the RCM article that the Royal Coachman was one of their most popular plans for years. Did any of you old timers out there build it 40 years ago? It would be fun to build it true to its 1965 original form, with an unthrottled engine, fixed nose wheel, and no ailerons. But I decided to go ahead and use an OS 15 FP, a torque wire main gear, and a tail wheel, and fly it with 4 channels. Looks like fun.
One other thing, for any of you folks who think you might be interested in learning to build from plans, this is a great way to get started. It's such a simple design that you can hardly go wrong, and it's fertile ground for improvising upgrades such as I mentioned above. The Q-Tee would be another good starting point.