Homemade RC Plane Scratch Built – Depron Slow Fly Trainer
This RC plane is my first scratch built and my first RC plane to be air borne. Yes I did make a couple of them before and they broke in 2 secs. I have had a Quad and a few micro Helis. I started with a few ideas, 100s of hours YouTube and Google later it came to this.
What started as a RC plane scratch build (Slow Fly Trainer) using RCTestFlight Plans changed to this custom design. The plan was customized mainly to adapt to the 4mm depron that I had. For sure this couldn’t support the ‘Single Layer’ wing design so I went with multiple layers of depron. In effect I didn’t have to bend the depron either. Then I used my child’s notebook cover, brown paper to give it an airfoil shape.
I was not sure about the weight increase caused by the depron layers so to compensate that I went with a larger wing area. Just to have a better chance at having a flight(lift / glide) I went with a larger aspect ratio by adding polyhedral pieces. i.e. extra pieces at the tips of the wing. I also added a slight dihedral to give it a self stabilizing property. Remember the goal of this design was to make a plane which will fly and not crash in first 10 secs.
For the parts I did a lot of research to get the motor, ESC and the battery to what I have. This is my first contact with the Brushless DC motor and the ESC. The Rx / Tx is RCB 7x from RC Bazaar which I had bought 6-7 years back. This system is obsolete now but the good thing about it is that it came with a USB dongle and a flight simulator software. This simulator is the only hands on RC plane time I had before today.
Rest as they say is history….
This long flying, long range drone now includes a three axis stabilized gimbal, a larger battery for longer flight time, and an optional PA megaphone speaker for crowd control ;-)
