Other projects

The Blue plane

The blue plane after a nice landing

The blue plane was our first and favorite home-built small airplane.It was designed and built by Sam and was piloted by both Sam and Ben. It's rudder, elevator and throttle control setup made it very easy to fly, and the high-wing and dihedral made it very stable. There was, however, one critical flaw in it's design, which showed itself when Sam was attempting a steep pull-up. The flaw was a weak wing joint, the result was total loss. The wing-span was about 45", the fuse length was about 40", and it was powered by an O.S. 10. We have thought about making a new blue plane with a stronger wing, but haven't had the time.

The Photo Plane

What is left of it

The photo plane was designed with just one purpose in mind: taking pictures from the air. It's too bad that it only took one picture before plummeting to the ground from 100' up, wing-less and at full power. It used a rudder and elevator for direction control. The engine was an O.S. 10, the wing-span was about 50", and the fuse length was about 40". The reason for the crash was a spar failure caused by a center-of-gravity too far aft, which made it over responsive, also the spar stock wasn't thick enough. It's flight characteristics were not at all pleasant because of high wing and power loadings, and a bad C.G. location. The lessons learned were: balance the airplane before flight, and use the strongest spar you can.

The Red plane

The red plane was designed by Sam, and built by Sam, Ben, and also Jay Kruckenberg. We built it just to have something to do, and completed it in just one day. This airplane was our first to use ailerons. The wing-span is about 50", the fuse length is about 40" and it was powered by an O.S. 10 FP. Top speed was only about 35mph (measured by racing with a pickup down the road) and it didn't climb very well because we didn't spend very much time smoothing out the covering. This airplane's best attribute was that it was very easy to fly just inches from the ground and then pull-up to do a crop duster type turn-around. Moe would always throw sticks at it, trying to knock it down. This airplane was retired because we wanted to put it's engine in the shrike.