F-117 almost done

Most of the foam parts are installed

F-117 top view

F-117 top view awaiting electronics.....

F-117 side view

This is the side view of the F-117 plane made from foam core. Will it fly?

F-117 from foam core

First step of the F-117 foam project. Make the belly/wing.

Note: it costs less than $10 to make this plane (of course electronics are not included)

Me and my balsa plane

Finally the plane is built and it flies (it is a nice cruising plane capable of very modest aerobatics)

Plane balsa skeleton

Note. I put the in-runner motor as that is the one i had from my Typhoon. In the future, i will use the outrunner, of course!

You will see that i went for oversize ailerons on the final covered version of the plane. Elevator and rudder are not attached on this picture.

This was my first project from scratch. More innovative nice parts are needed to make these kits more popular. After all, they are fun.

Side view

All that is left is: install pushrods, landing gear, establish control throws, figure out where to mount the battery for the correct CG. Great planes: is is not the best design to take the wing off every time you change the battery, it is terribly annoying.

There will be test flight pictures in the future (hopefully).

Note: Thank you Lawrence for all the tips and the Blenderm tape suggestion to connect movable surfaces.

Plane look after it is covered (except some parts of the belly

This is the colour scheme I chose for the final look. Just two colours for the first project.

Install electronics

Use double sided tape to install servos. I modified the wing to accommodate two servos.

Cover the fuse

Cover the fuse. Start covering from back going forward.

Covering the wing

make sure you don'w warp the wing as you shrink it. Shrink the bottom first! Top Flight Heat Gun was a saviour working with monokote.

Step three

Covering the tail (mistake was i installed the surfaces first instead of covering them before mounting them

Step three

Building the fuse

Step Two

Building the wings

STEP ONE

Building the tail surfaces on the gypsum board. Use ceram wrap to protect the plans being glued to the balsa surfaces

Hello World,

This blog is about building an RV-4 RC balsa plane by Great Planes from a kit. This is my first build and it is far from being perfect. I will supply a small comment with each step of the build that you can see on a corresponding picture.

Overall conclusion:

Build such plane if you want to have an idea about what balsa planes are all about.

Your mistakes are very important as you learn from them (incorrect cutting of sticks that are too short, warped wings, burned holes in the monokote, etc. )

You will learn tons of important techniques from pinning a part to the gypsum board (those work great by the way) to covering the model with plastic covering such as monokote.