My first electric airplanes were before brushless motors existed.
I converted a “slow stick” to brushless and glued two of its wings back to back to make a fully cemetrical airfoil.
0 to full throttle would cause it to immediately go vertical. I had flaperons set up on it and it would fly backwards in a stiff breeze.
Kinda still wish I had that one. It’d be perfect for where I plan on flying.
A friend and I also tried kit bashing the cheap dollar store airplanes. Those never flew well.
That BloodyWonder was a really nice flying plane!
Did the battery shifting cause the death dive?
Here is a classic stereo 3D photo (cross-view) of me in 10th grade with my first RC plane, a Cox 049 powered high-wing trainer (The QT), all balsa and liteply with Monokote covering. My Kraft radio had only TWO CHANNELS!
I only flew it 1/2 a flight. I had a nice old guy test it out for me at the field and it flew fantastic, he even looped it. I flew it for a little while, then it ran out of gas and he landed it for me. No problem. Got a bigger gas tank. I took it out to the huge lawn by the Rose Bowl known as Brookside Park with a friend. We were just testing out the motor driving it on the lawn, and he had the controls when it just took off. The manual said it was only for hand-launching, so I did not expect it to take off. I cheered and said, “Hey, fly it!” Before I could have a try, he dove it straight into the grass at full speed. It was completely destroyed. Since I had encouraged him to try to fly it (with no experience) it was my fault. Since then, I have crashed many, many times, some recoverable, some not.
No. I lost too much speed and it tip stalled.
My late fishing/flying buddy and I set about to prove that very thing – getting into RC on the cheap – back in the 2010 time frame. RC was a rich man’s game when we were young but with the availability of cheap electric motors and electronics from China, we were able to get started for $100 or so. At first, we downloaded simple foamy PDF plans and hand-cut our planes from bluecore fan-fold insulation foam from Lowes… and with a cheap $35-$40 transmitter we flew – and crashed – those planes out in my pasture. Eventually, “demolition derby” style flying became our favorite past-time… flying, crashing, field-repairing with tape, craft sticks, skewers, hot glue, etc. Last man left with enough “plane” that could be thrown into the air, and “flown” for any distance, won.
But I quickly learned to hate hand-cutting planes and, with my EE background and burgeoning interest in CNC, I set about developing the needle cutter. I built my buddy a similar BuildYourCNC-inspired 3-axis machine with a needle cutter and soon we were able to retire each night to our homes and cut our simple planes and assemble a new one over-night… and be back at it again the next evening. What great fun we had.
With SketchUP we were able to start designing our own planes and wound up with quite a fleet. The F4D Skyray (middle top) was our best flyer and we built countless others. Cheap, quick/easy to build… we quickly got over our apprehensions and fear of crashing.
I’m out of the RC and needle cutter “business” now but we did prove that getting into RC doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive and great fun can be had with just a bunch of foam board and a few relatively cheap RC components.
Did you ever publish any of your Sketchup plane model files?
Those things look awesome.
No, never did. Most of our planes were modeled after military planes and eventually we settled on a size and wing span appropriate for little BlueWonder motors and one panel of fan fold. Some were front-prop WW2 fighters but most were prop-in-slot jets… some flew well, others not.
Our needle cutter systems changed over time as well, going from LinuxCNC-driven CNC machines and bluecore foam…
to over-sized Marlin-driven MPCNC’s and DTFB…
Lots of fun times we had playing with this stuff.
Poking around on the Flitest site, I do see their mini Tiny Twig. That looks like a pretty slick little plane. I may have to give that a go. I need to read more about their ‘flight pack F’ and their flight controller. I was going to put a f405 wing in my build. Theirs may be just as good and would require less work.
I’ve built a few flight test planes and they work well. Just as advertised.
At some point, I bought a box of the foam and I intended to make a foam cutter. But I have since shifted priorities.
I got to build a flying wing style drone in grad school like 12 years ago, it had a foam body. I spent most of that summer learning all about flying RC and getting it built, I could never get it to fly properly though. It would fly like 20-50 ft and crash nose first lol eventually split in half and my advisor got an Ebee and that thing was amazing! Click and drag a box on a map, hit go, pick up drone, shake it to start the engine, give it a gentle toss. My theory on why I couldn’t get mine to fly is due to the remote control, I think the left stick had some drift to it.
Looking back on it, it would have been awesome to have learned on a dead simple design first lol. My controller alone had like 20 buttons and switches, and the drone had a pixhawk computer that I had to calibrate and pray that I did it right.. It was all still a great time though!
That looks a lot like one of the VTOL aircraft I’ve been admiring.
David, yes, similar but yours is a bit bigger. Have you ever flown a 3d printed plane? I don’t think I will because they are so brittle and I crash too much 
Getting the transitions to go smoothly (especially at the end of flight) has been tricky for me. I use Arduplane, which has so many parameters and you must get them right or it falls out of the sky.
I have not. One of the first things I 3d printed many years ago was a plane for a friend of mine out of PLA. It flew really well until he crashed it. His fault, not the plane’s. That as back before LWPLA existed and the plane was really a bit of a porker for it’s size.
It was this one:
His did end up having issues, but to be fair, it was early on in my 3d printing life and it may have not been the strongest prints with the best layer adhesion. I mean… this video was from 8 years ago.
