Quote: rcheli12 Hey Nicolas,
From the sounds of it your no stranger to fabrication and have quite the arsenal at your disposal.
I think you would be limiting yourself by building a Top-flite kit. If you don't like the wood, you end up replacing it anyways. I've never built one, however I find that with kits you end up resigning something that's already been designed and fabricated.
In my opinion for scale fidelity, ease of building, and designing plans the list is low to high.
Meister plans
Nick Ziroli Planes
Jerry Bates plans.
A friend is building a meister p47, and there have been some hurdles. Ribs need to be leveled, things need to be altered and overall they require a lot of tweaking. However I heard they fly fantastic and overall the structure is very strong.
I've gone through a lot of Nick Ziroli plans and have the Sbd and P38 flown and in the detailing stage. They are hand drawn plans too, so some fairing and shaping of ribs and formers is required. They are solid designing and all of his planes follow the same building format. There are tons of threads to reference as well.
I haven't built a Bates yet, but I have his P-51B plans and have followed many of his builds. His plans certainly are cad drawn and seem like they're meant to be laser or cnc cut. I would consider them to be the most accurate of the 3, and everyone who has flown them has nothing but good things to say.
Of course this is only my opinion, so please take it with a grain of salt. No matter what you choose run a build thread, and questions or concerns you have someone has already seen and solved it, your in good hands here.
Best of luck
Kyle
Hello Kyle, thanks for the encouragement, after lot of thinking and considerations during these days I finally decided to go for the scratch route- every single kit option I found is way too expensive for me at this point and I'd like to save the budget for a nice engine. I'd also like to DIY the retracts, it's a nice machining challenge and I'm already "CADing" a couple of ideas. So far, two sets of plans grabbed my attention- the F6 by Mr. Veich which I found in the site supporter plans section and David Andersen's LA7 The Lavochkin is one of my all times favorite and it's a challenging build but it is also "old school" and big meaning a lot of lite plywood which I can easily buy locally and CNC cut the entire kit in a couple of days. The retracts are not that complicated mechanically. The Hellcat was a personal favorite in Combat Flight Simulator 2 in the 90s :), it's smaller, cheaper to build but the rotating retracts are way more challenging. Given all this, I began to work with Andersen's LA7 plans, been drawing them in CAD for several hours already and adapting them for common local sizes of wood (we are metric here). Once I have them in CAD, I'll decide If I'm going to build them as is or go for a foam wing laminated with balsa and glass.
|