He’s quite proud of his creation. It is a 1/8th scale model of a FM-2 Wildcat. The Wildcat was designed by Grumman, an American manufacturer and was flown by both the British and the Americans during World War II. The FM-2 Wildcat is the model that they made the most of and was built by General Motors. The particular color scheme that he chose to use is U.S. Navy camouflage from 1942. It’s very good at disappearing into the sky, a little to good at it. It’s very easy to loose when you are trying to follow it with a camera or remotely control it from the ground.
My husband got the plans from Model Airplane News, but he modified them quite a bit. He scratch built it, which means he went out and bought many piece of balsawood and sawed and sanded each little part to perfection. Don’t even get me started on amount of sawdust scattered throughout my apartment. While scratch building once was the norm for this hobby, less than 1 in 100 planes flown by his fellow club members are scratch built. It has a 57-inch wingspan, but only weights 7 pounds. He put a Magnum 4 stroke .91 cubic inch engine in it, which makes it cruise at about 90 miles per hour. It's a pretty fast little machine.
Video sharing at JussPress.com
I’ve had a little extra time to experiment recently and set up an account with JussPress, thanks to a tip off from J Bo. All of these videos are silent and of very poor quality, because they were taken with the video function on my regular digital camera. I ask you to imagine that you are viewing a silent handheld movie from the era that this plane was originally flown. Aren’t you impressed that it’s in color?
Video sharing at JussPress.com
You can view more videos from that outing at JussPress and see his last airplane project here. In the past month he has made various repairs and improvements to this project including rebuilding his landing gear twice. He hasn’t completely committed to what his next project will be. I think he's leaning heavily in the direction of building another Wildcat, but I this time he’s going to create his own plans.
4 comments:
That plane is really moving! Very impressive, Lora. How much does it cost to do a project like that? I suspect it's out of my comfort zone but looking at the pics and footage of the Wildcat is very inspiring so I'm tempted...
Cute video! Fun to watch the little guy in the sky.
That's pretty darn cool.
That's a pretty cool little plane!
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