The Hobby Quest

n CA Glue and accelerator (spray). There are many different brands claiming they’re the best. Buy whatever’s available at your local hobby shop. You probably won’t notice any difference between the brands. Just take note that there are different thicknesses. I primarily use “medium” thickness in class because it’s easiest to work with and will fill in gaps when the two pieces being glued are not perfectly touching each other. “Thin” CA soaks in better for a stronger joint in some cases, but much easier to spill out too much onto your plane and make a mess. CA gets hot when drying so be very cautious about getting on your skin.

n Balsa sheet for wing, rudder, and elevator. I would suggest for starting out using 1/8” thick balsa sheet for the wing and 1/16” thick balsa for the elevator and rudder.

n For the fuselage, you can shape a profile out of thin balsa sheet, but you have to make it strong using a stick like the Mustang or only a stick and no profile like the Thunder. The stick is not balsa – it wouldn’t be strong enough. This stick is made out of spruce and you can buy it right next to the balsa sheets at the hobby shop.

n The hooks we used were made from regular straight pins. You’ll have to copy the shape of the hook you have now.

n Rubber can be bought in a small box at your hobby shop. Don’t buy rubber bands. It will come as one very long piece you just cut to the length you need and tie a knot.

TIPS

Remember when designing the plane, the wings, rudder, and elevator can take most any shape, just keep the proportions pretty close to the proportions of the planes we built in class. In other words, if the wing was 200mm long, you definitely don’t want an elevator 200 mm long. It only needs to be 50 or 60 mm long. The rudder can be even smaller.

To keep the plane light, your tail (elevator and rudder) needs to be built as lightweight as possible. When I build planes at home I would sand the spruce fuselage down much thinner and narrower towards the tail of the plane. The planes we build in class are built strong for highly abusive pilots and are designed to withstand hard crashes. You can build yours at home much lighter which will give you much higher and longer flights. On some of my planes, I even use carbon tubes for the back end of the fuselage because it is so light and strong. It is very expensive though.

For a real challenge, you can buy small kits at the hobby shop which come with all the wood, rubber and propeller you need. This might be a good idea to start with. You can find designs online also if you want to use your own wood and build from scratch.

Don’t forget to put dihedral in the wing. A straight flat wing will not fly straight. You need the dihedral to help keep the plane flying straight and level.

Contact me if you have questions mike@thehobbyquest.com