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 This system is obsolete now but the good thing about it is that it came with a USB dongle and a flight simulator software.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….
Strong Santa Ana conditions on Jan 19 2021 provided enough wind for Spencer Lisenby to bring the dynamic soaring speed record back to its birthplace of Parker Mountain, CA
