The Aerodromerc News Enthusiasts

A unique selection of World War I and By and For Golden Age laser cut Electric Flight short kits and plans The AerodromeRC News Enthusiasts

VOL 1 - NO 10 October 2005 www.AerodromeRC.com

also improves the look as the fins on these motors were E�� very fine and cannot be properly simulated by alternate By Kurt Bengtson stacks of thin ply and balsa. The double thread method can also be used to give a three-dimensioned look. It has been a summer of change here at AerodromeRC. In sum, a new line of models, free flight design, laser cut We introduced a line of small 1/12th scale models for strip stock, spoked wheels and WWI dummy motors are indoor/backyard flight and free flight. The first is the all new introductions at AerodromeRC. Many of these are 1/12th scale SE5a for AXI power followed by the GWS IPS a direct result of comments or suggestions that customers powered Albatros DII and the GWS IPS powered Fokker have made over the years. I value this feedback and DR.1. Our first foray into free flight designs is our GWS encourage customers to suggest ideas. IPS powered Sparrow II Version 2. These models are not really a change in direction for our products but a supplement to them. I like to design models of all sizes and feel that market for the smaller versions warrants my offering the types. Naturally, the AerodromeRC A��RC F�� EIII design philosophy is still active. I will not add dihedral or change the overall outline of the model. Ailerons E�� are featured in models without dihedral and they are coupled to the rudder servo in order to save weight and By Kurt Bengtson simplify construction. I feel that even though the models The Fokker EIII Eindecker is an oft modeled subject and are small, they should still be interesting until now, I was not very interested to subjects for the intermediate builder. design one for AerodromeRC. Having Therefore, I do not skimp very much on designed four variants of the Pfalz EI, detail. Weight savings are accomplished I�� I�� the Fokker EIII seemed to be too similar by changes in wood thickness and type. 1 • E�� for me to pay serious attention. However, Triple laminated longerons from laser 1 • A��RC F�� work had begun on a model about a year ago. It was one of those models that cut 1/32” balsa strips are used in some EIII E�� of the models. This type of construction received attention when other design offers strength and low weight. These 3 • B�� T��: L�� work got stale. As sometimes happens, smaller kits are also featuring nearly 4 • A��RC F�� the design caught my interest and I was complete wood parts including leading D�1 M�� fully engaged in the process. I refer edge, spar, stringer, sheeting and 5 • P�� F�� M�� to this occurrence as “falling in love” trailing edge stock. Look for this feature with the design. I found new ideas and in larger kits as well. I use the laser to opportunities for design and now that it cut strip wood from the balsa stock. The laser cut stock is finished, I am very happy with the result. In this article, will fit better and for customers in Europe, hunting down I will discuss the model and the original aircraft, pointing English dimensioned wood will not be required. out corresponding features and comparing them. The free flight Sparrow II V2 is for timed shut down The Fokker E series monoplanes were the first truly of electric power and a spiral back to earth style flight. effective fighter aircraft. The reason is that for the first Its construction has been considerably lightened from time, a machine gun was placed to fire directly through the our R/C version. While the Sparrow II V2 is for FF use, propeller. The whole aircraft could be aimed at the target. it can be modified for indoor /backyard R/C flight very Finally, accurate targeting easily. I retained the separate rudder and elevators. The was possible. The result was D�� fuselage has the same amount of internal space as the R/ spectacular for the Germans In the early months of C version. and a disaster for the Allies. the war, aerial combat was between opposing observers The new Fokker EIII introduced two new construction Allied observation aircraft in two seater aircraft flying features. The first is a laser cut, spoked wheel kit with a became the primary target. parallel to each other. They one-time use jig. I’ll be using this feature on more models The period was referred were firing at each other’s in the future. It does add a bit to the cost of the model but to as the Fokker Scourge. aircraft with rifles and later Before that time, observation machine guns. While not getting the exact scale spoked wheels included in the kit as effective as later fighter is a real plus. The second is a WWI dummy rotary engine. aircraft could do their aircraft, some aircraft were I found a way to incorporate a version of the Lycoming work unfettered with the shot down in this manner. style dummy engine I developed for the Stearman. That concern of being shot down. motor is rather expensive as I used stacks of laser cut discs Observation aircraft were to make the cylinders. In the Oberursal, I removed most designed for optimum stability as a camera platform. Agility of the discs and replaced it with a printed-paper card and speed were contrary to their purpose. The idea that stock sleeve, lowering the weight and cost. The design these aircraft were obsolete or not technically advanced is The AerodromeRC News VOL 1 - NO 10 Page 2 www.AerodromeRC.com not the case. Taking aerial photographs with existing camera Second, it reinforces the joining of the spars. Third, it technology was difficult and required a slow aircraft with strengthens the fuselage. The tubing fits into plywood low engine vibration characteristics. Further, it required donuts epoxied to the wooden sides of the front portion of a two-man crew. The pilot needed to reach the correct the fuselage. With a suitable mounting scheme, the wings location and verify the target. The cameraman needed to can be made removable. However, this is not detailed in the concentrate on taking the photographs. Remember in those current version of the kit. days, there were no accurate aerial maps and from above, The construction of orientation is not easy. Landmarks do not look the same D�� the fuselage is similar from 5000 feet. Pilots did get lost. A major reason for the Some historians say that Fokker to other AerodromeRC copied a Morane H to make his Fokker Scourge could be that the “Fokker Fodder” were not Eindecker. While the aircraft share models and features designed to consider defensive measures. With hundreds a similar layout, the construction a wooden slab sided perhaps thousands of Allied vulnerable observation aircraft technique Fokker used was based front box and a built in the air, it was carnage. The Allies had too much invested on bent steel tubing rather than up rear frame. The wood. The Pfalz EI, which was a and needed the information so badly that these unfortunate licensed copy of the Morane H, had forward section of the crews had to endure the Fokker menace. Later, observation inferior performance to the Fokker. fuselage is constructed aircraft were fitted with machine guns and could fly higher This fact indicates Fokker had a of a combination of and faster to counter the Fokker. better and unique design. balsa and plywood Anthony Fokker had designed aileron controls for aircraft forming a 3/16” thick but chose the more conventional wing warping technique wall. The design locks the wings, undercarriage and motor for the Eindecker. Wing warping required flexibility in the into a common structural unit for strength. 3/16” balsa for construction but rigidity at the same time. Heavy reliance uprights and cross pieces is laser cut and included in the kit. on wire rigging made this possible. In the AerodromeRC There is enough stock supplied for spliced longerons. Fokker EIII, wing warping was not used, as the method The cowl is built from plywood and balsa and sanded to a does not make a particularly pleasant flying experience. rounded over shape. There are locating holes provided for Construction is difficult and the structure is fragile. 4-40 blind nuts to allow the cowl to be removable. The cowl Instead, as in the case of other AerodromeRC monoplane aligns with the fuselage, which has blue/pink Styrofoam designs, hidden top edge hinged trailing edge ailerons are side cheeks, and the whole covered with metallized foil or employed. A pair of in wing servos drives these ailerons silvered iron on covering. It may be burnished with a rotating from below. From the top, the presence of the ailerons is eraser fitted in a low speed drill for a scale appearance. nearly impossible to detect. They are constructed from 1” trailing edge stock, which is beveled at the aileron leading edge to allow the aileron to deflect downward.

The wing of the Eindecker was of the under cambered The dummy motor doubles as the motor mount. The kit airfoil and used two spars which also served as attachment was designed for the AXI 2820 direct drive brushless motor points for rigging wire. These features are replicated in the but any planetary style geared motor of similar diameter model. Wing incidence is as the original and corresponds (1.4147”) and power can be substituted. The AXI motor can to that needed for under camber. The leading edge is 3/8” be mounted forwards or backwards and a mounting plate diameter carbon tubing or wooden dowel. The round shape composed of two laminations of 1/16” ply is provided. A eliminates sanding the leading edge. The tubing stops at short prop shaft adapter extension may be needed. The the side cheeks and does not pass into the fuselage. This core of the dummy motor is a stack of 1/4” balsa and 1/8” feature replicates the original design. The internal spars are plywood laser cut 9 sided sections bound together by glue made from 1/4” O.D. carbon fiber tubing fitted into brass and three 3” long 4-40 bolts which fit into three 4-40 blind tubing inside the fuselage. The brass tubing serves several nuts inside the firewall. A spacer made from 1/16” ply is functions. First, it fixes the wing location and incidence. placed at one location, which pivots the dummy motor and The AerodromeRC News VOL 1 - NO 10 Page 3 www.AerodromeRC.com AXI, motor to have right and down thrust. More material or washers can be added if more down /right thrust is needed. The cylinders are made from 1/8” square stock balsa shafts with two 1/4” balsa discs set at the top and bottom of the cylinder. They serve as cylinder ends and a printed fin pattern on card stock is wrapped as a sleeve over the cylinder to finish the effect. Discs of balsa top the cylinders to complete the motor. A dual thread method can also be used. It this process, two threads of thick carpet thread are wrapped around the sleeve and tack glued in place. One thread is removed leaving the other behind. The whole is CA’ed in place and painted, looking like fins.

finished with filler to form a perfect fitting channel for the tire. Fokker designed a rather elaborate undercarriage for the EIII, and it was replicated as closely as practical in our model. Fokker included wire cross bracing and I replicated that too. From a structural standpoint, the undercarriage is not very sound without cross bracing and I specify Kevlar thread for these in the plan. The larger 1/8” diameter music wire parts fit into brass tubing epoxied into plywood lined channels in the fuselage. The inner UC members are made from 3/32” music wire and are lashed and soldered together or by my favorite, Kevlar thread and CA with an Epoxy finish. The EIII had a pylon on top for rigging wires and our EIII has that as well made from a holed 1/16” plywood tab mated with two ¼” wooden dowels. The dowels meet a plywood cross piece under the decking and spanning the sides of the fuselage. Plywood mounting points are epoxied to the spars and ribs. Small hand made wire eyelets or fishing hook eyes can be used to attach the rigging.

B�� T��: L�� By Bert Ayers The AerodromeRC Fokker EIII includes a spoked wheel kit. It has a disposable jig included to wrap Kevlar thread around a central core ring of 1/16” plywood and a brass tube/ply hub. The lacing is all in one piece of Kevlar. Instead of using holes in the ply I chose to wrap around the ring edge. Holes weaken the wheel, as the holding thickness is only 1/32” of wood when they are used. The wrapping pattern sequence is etched on the core ring and the jig so when lacing the thread, one can’t get lost. The wrapping is not to be done too tightly as the ply ring is not laterally strong at this point. The idea is to wrap the thread just tightly enough to take out the slack and move on. Later, laser cut 1/8” and 1/6” ply rings are laminated on D�� to complete the Saulnier went on to design deflector plates to deflect bullets striking the rim. Thin thread propeller as a way around the ammunition is used, and it quality problems. However, these were will be laminated inadequate and propeller damage did inside the wheel occur. Roland Garros skilled mechanic rim and be held Jules Hue modified Saulnier’s deflection securely in place. plates mounted on the propeller to be One of the things I really enjoy about Aerodrome Kits is Finally, when test stronger and mounted the system on a adding scale details. I usually build the kit as designed, but Morane L. Garros was able to shoot down fitting a neoprene I like the challenge of adding panels, bumps, straps, gas/oil two Albatros observation aircraft in two foam tire; the rim caps, lacing, rivets, louvers-----LOUVERS, holy cow, would weeks. interior may be you believe an airplane that has 121 louvers!!! The SPAD The AerodromeRC News VOL 1 - NO 10 Page 4 www.AerodromeRC.com A��RC F�� D�1 M�� By Steven Perry Many brushless motor/gearbox combinations are designed to use a GWS type stick mount. The trouble with stick mounts is that the stick breaks, usually in the most inconvenient place to fix. In building an Aerodrome RC Fokker Dr1 for a friend, I was faced with the need to modify the motor mount to use a stick mount. I decided to use an unbreakable stick attached to an unbreakable motor plate with breakaway nylon bolts. This way I could decide exactly where breaks will occur.

series of aircraft have an enormous number of louvers. How to make that many (reasonable looking) louvers without adding too much weight to my SPAD VII was the challenge. In the past I’ve used 1/16 inch balsa sanded half round to simulate louvers. I was not about to make 121 balsa louvers, plus many needed to be on a curved surface (bottom of nose section). On large gas powered models we used printers’ lithoplate and a wooden mold to punch out louvers. I looked for something similar to lithoplate but lighter and thinner. Aluminum tape (found in most home improvement stores- --air duct aisle), we call it thousand mile an hour tape, because we used it to patch up real airplanes. I made some test attempts and found it made perfect louvers and was very light. Draw the louver pattern on the tape, cut though the straight open part, then with the knife blade lift up and CF L�� shape the louver. Later I found that a small screwdriver offered more control in shaping the louver. The real problem While I did this on a Dr1, the method is applicable to any is that all this MUST be done on the model. If you do it on a design that uses a flat horizontal motor plate with a notch flat surface then try to lift it up to move it to the model---you cut for the motor/gearbox. destroy the whole thing. Do it right on the model. Even on The first step is to fill in the large notch in the motor plate. curved surfaces (see the bottom of the SPAD nose). Give it a I used the piece from the ply parts sheet from which the try, you will find that it is not that difficult. motor plate was taken. If you chucked that already, just trace the shape and cut and sand a piece of ply to fit. After filling in the motor notch in the motor plate, it was obvious that it needed re-enforcement. I used D�� some carbon fiber The first successful fighter the “ribbon”. This is 3” Fokker EIII used a synchronized machine gun firing through the wide and cut to length. propeller. Fokker’s invention was not Fiberglass cloth or mat the first as a Swiss engineer Franz can also be used, as Schneider patented such a concept can used dryer sheets. before the war, as did France’s I used CA on the CF. Robert Esnault-Pelterie. Saulnier, unaware of the others, developed Epoxy would work his own system and was successful well with glass. using a Hotchkiss machine gun. I laid up a flat section The reason it was not implemented of CF across the was due to ammunition quality. Machine gun rounds were often bottom of the motor not uniform and varied in the time plate, fibers running to fire. The result was that some side to side. Then I laid bullets hit the propeller and made up two overlapping the concept useless. Therefore, it pieces running down was the quality of German machine gun rounds that made possible the the sidewalls with the Fokker Scourge. fibers oriented fore and The AerodromeRC News VOL 1 - NO 10 Page 5 www.AerodromeRC.com

aft. This made the motor plate virtually unbreakable. Next I laminated up a motor stick. I used 1/8 x 1/4 spruce sticks. Three sticks glued together along their 1/4” sides B�� made a core 3/8” wide and 1/4” deep. Next I used some CF strip. This is available from Midwest Products and is CF strips and about half the thickness of the spruce, the slightly larger than 1/16” x 3/8”. I CAed a piece on the top remaining stick is still unbreakable. That CF is strong stuff. and bottom of the spruce core. This I carefully sanded to a The final step is to align the stick on the plate to account snug push fit into the stick mount in the gearbox. for fore and aft location of the motor as well as right thrust, The theory was to bolt this to the motor plate using nylon (the plate itself establishes the down thrust), and drill two bolts and blind nuts. In reality the prop shaft did not line holes for the nylon bolts and blind nuts. I used 4-40 nylon bolts and blind nuts. With the motor stick bolted up to the motor plate and in exact alignment, I CAed two strips of 1/8 x 1/4 spruce snug along either side of the stick. I glued them to the plate taking care not to glue them to the stick. The result is a very strong motor mount that will break away at the nylon bolts in the event of a hard nose- over.

D�� In spite of being fully aware of a German patent for synchronizing a machine gun to shoot through a propeller, the German military initially planned to copy the deﬂection plate concept used in Garros’s N�� Morane L. However, tests using German machine �� guns destroyed the propeller and nearby technicians narrowly avoided the ricocheting bullets. The up with the hole in the cowl. This necessitated making a difference was that German machine guns ﬁred long notch in the stick, which allowed the assembly to sit steel jacketed ammunition at high muzzle velocity. It was at this point hat they turned to Fokker for help. close enough to the motor plate so the prop shaft lined up with the hole in the cowl. While that eliminated one of the P�� F�� M�� V��, A�� By Kurt Bengtson Some time ago I visited the planes of Fame Museum in Valle, Arizona not far from the Grand Canyon. (Website: http://www.planesoffame.org/) Here is a list of aircraft featured there and a few photos that I took. Aircra�/Status Aichi D3A2 Val (Tora BT-15 Conversion)/Flying S�� Baby Great Lakes Biplane/Static The AerodromeRC News VOL 1 - NO 10 Page 6 www.AerodromeRC.com Bede BD-5V/Static Planes of Fame Museum of Valle, Arizona Bristol F2b/Flying Cessna L-19 Bird Dog/Flying Curtiss Model 50 Robin/Flying DeHavilland Vampire Mk III/Static Douglas AD-4N Skyraider/Flying Douglas RB-26C Invader/Flying Ford 5-AT Trimotor/Flying Grumman Fl1F-1 Tiger/Static Grumman G32A (2 place F3F-2)/Flying Grumman J2F-6 Duck/Flying Hawker Hunter Mk 58/Flying Law Ann Model DD- I Biplane/Static Lockheed C-121A Constellation/Flying Lockheed T-33 Shooting Star/Static B�� BD-5V Messerschmitt Me-109G-10/U4 Gustov/Static Mikoyan Gurevich MiG-15/Static Mooney Mite/Static North American F-86L Sabre cockpit/Static North American T-28C Trojan/Flying North American T-6G/SNJ-4 Texan/Flying Pius S-2 ‘Double Take/Flying Republic F-105B Thunderchief fuselage/Static Republic F-84B Thunderjet/Static Rutan Long-Easy Homebuilt/Static Schmidt Commuter Helicopter/Static Siemens-Schukert DIV/Flying Sorta Baby Lakes/Static Standard J-1/Static B�� F2B Stearman PT-17 Kadet/Flying Yokosuka D4Y Suiscu ‘Judy’ (in crash scene)/Static Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka 11 ‘Cherry Blossom/Static

D�� The German authorities were reluctant to accept the new Fokker Eindecker even after they had requested its development. Fokker was asked for a “proof of concept” demonstration which was having Fokker, personally, shoot down an enemy aircraft. He was Dutch and technically neutral but was given German uniform and German military papers identifying him as member of the German air service. He ﬂew for 5 days without encountering an enemy aircraft until he found a hapless Farman observation airplane and began his attack. Getting closer and closer, he could see the crew and found that he could not kill these men and he returned to the airﬁeld. Hearing this, the German pilots understood and subsequently used his machine to accomplish the task. The era of the Fokker Scourge and modern aerial combat had begun. B�� F2B The AerodromeRC News VOL 1 - NO 10 Page 7 www.AerodromeRC.com Planes of Fame Museum of Valle, Arizona

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G�� G32A (2 �� F3F-2) S�� - S�� DIV

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Planes of Fame Museum of Valle, Arizona

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Planes of Fame Museum of Valle, Arizona

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The AerodromeRC News The AerodromeRC News is a free monthly publication of www.AerodromeRC.com a division of Bengtson Company. Newsletters are available as free downloads from our website. Materials in The AerodromeRC News are protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced without written permission. Submission Information E-mail your article and/or pictures of: • WWI or Golden Age planes • your model • building tip S�� PT -17 K�� • an opinion on a modeling topic to: [email protected] or mail to: AerodromeRC Webzine PO Box 51102 Pacific Grove CA 93950 Articles and photos are accepted on a voluntary basis. Authors do not receive compensation. Text and photos in digital format is preferred but not required. Please submit articles in *.txt, *.doc format or typewritten. Photo resolution of 72 dpi minimum; 150 to 300 dpi preferred. Contact Information Address: PO Box 51102 Pacific Grove CA 93950 Phone and Fax: 831-393-0991 E-Mail: [email protected] Y�� MXY-7 O�� 11 C�� B��