I’ve built several planes across several decades, but only have about 7 seconds of “flight” time. I’ve recently joined the AMA and our local club, and have a FliteTest Simple Cub all wired up and ready to go. Now I just need the courage to get out there and put it up in the air. I’m hesitant because I’m not very successful with landings on the simulator yet. I took a few full-size flying lessons in my teens and always remember my instructor saying “Takeoffs are optional. Landings aren’t.” At least the build effort behind the cub if it comes down hard won’t be as bad as when the Goldberg Electra I built from balsa and taught myself to monokote re-kitted itself vitually immediately.
The cutter I printed is the “improved needle cutter” by @jhitesma. I got it off of Printables as I’m not patient enough to put up with the slowness and ad bloat of Thingiverse for it to be my primary search locale any longer.
My late fishing/flying buddy and I decided quite late in life to see what the state of RC was and started downloading and taping together PDF plane patterns from FliteTest and elsewhere, hand-cutting them with exacto knives, and then flying them out in my pasture. It was great fun but I quickly grew tired of hand-cutting plans and, with my already active interest in CNC, I started work on adapting Tom McGuire’s foam cutter idea to conventional 3-axis CNC machines. Eventually, we developed an entire fleet of simple foamy “prop in a slot” plane designs that, in the air, mimicked some of our favorite planes… and could be quickly needle-cut to replace planes we flew and crashed “demolition-derby style” out in the pasture. These planes cost so little and were so quick to build… it greatly alleviated the fear of flying – and crashing – them.
With my spastic thumbs, I never really got the hang of flying… and ultimately found my greatest enjoyment in the design and building of planes and machines to cut them. My buddy OTOH became quite good at flying and, in time, I found more enjoyment in cutting and building my planes… and then handing them over to him to fly. It was great fun!
Jason’s “improved needle cutter” should work well for you. Be sure to keep us all up to date on your progress.
Those look great! Do you have a catalog of your favorite plane designs?
I think it would be fun to build and try to learn to fly. I have a 9 channel radio that could work I suppose. My boy was into quads a few years back and we went to flight fest circa 2017 I believe. The derby times there were most entertaining with things falling out of the sky due to impact. Flying RC for me isn’t intuitive. For some time I’ve been considering making an RC hovercraft or a snowmobile for winter.
I would love to pick your brains eventually - I have a couple of busker organs in the half finished (now where did I leave that box when we moved house 15 years ago) - so sometime in the next ten years will be great if you keep posting progress!
Oh, heavens no! The planes shown are just adaptations of various planes we found on the various forums/websites back in the 2010-2012 timeframe. We made them CNC-ready for our machines using SketchUp, added tabs and slots to strengthen them and simplify construction, and most often adjusted their size to let us “standardize” on small 3000kv BW motors and 2-cell LIPO batteries which we could stock up on. This made for very inexpensive planes that we could fly and crash… and then needle-cut a replacement overnight that we could assemble and fly again the next day. Most often the electrics would survive our crashes and it was usually simply a matter of cutting a new airframe and transferring the electrics over to go at it again.
One of our favorites – and sweetest-flying – was an adaptation of the F4D Skyray that had an ~16" wingspan and used a little 3000k BW motor and a 2-cell LIPO battery…
Both these designs were easy to build and flew very nicely with our “standard” motor and electrics setup. As my buddy and I were new to RC late in life, we both found it great fun to learn… and these foamy designs were inexpensive enough to remove all the apprehension and fear of crashing. We’d fly “demolition-derby” style and field repair our planes with tape, craft sticks, skewers, hot glue, zip-ties, etc… crashing, repairing, and re-launching again – until there simply wasn’t enough “airplane” left to fly anymore. Overnight, we could then needle-cut and assemble a new one and go at it again the next day. It was indeed great fun!
If you want a decent trainer plain to learn on I recommend the seababy. Its not the coolest looking, but its very forgiving for learning to fly. The prop and motor are safe and out of the nose so crashing just means replacing some foam. the boat hull lets you land almost anywhere. I’ve been using one for my kids and guests to fly for years. I just build with de-papered foam board from dollar tree.
Thanks for sharing @ttraband, @dkj4linux, and @notnewton! This needlecutter and simple flight is on my list now. There is a group of fliers at work and they have a runway. I’ll look into trying it out. The boat and F4 and F22 all look like reasonable places to start and with the protected propeller won’t hopefully be destroyed immediately. The materials are minimal cost. What battery gear would you recommend? I have a radio that should work. I’ll start a new thread when I get the needle cutter built and continue this conversation there and I’ll be watching with interest to see how the rest of you do with your builds.
Observation: if the F4 had two tail fins similar to the F22, I think it would look like an F14 or F15. The A10 is pretty nice as well. I had a friend build a monokote corsair with balsa and epoxy, but I don’t know he ever flew it. What an undertaking that was! Beautiful plane though. I’ve watched really old flite test videos of combat where they strap a marker to the plan and you have to draw on the other plane to win. It really looks like lots of fun.
This needle cutter is detailed here in my long-running thread over on the FliteTest forum. I built and tested numerous needle cutter designs over the years… but ultimately kept coming back to the same basic design layout (with no extra bearing guides) that I started with.
I’ve nearly built a needle cutter several times, because I would like to make these foamie planes (I’ve not yet.). It may yet show up as a topic in the random category. I need to finish a few other projects first. A portable MPR&P with a needle cutter making giveaway foam fliers would be sweet for a maker event demonstration.
Interesting that you would mention that. I’ve been rummaging through my junkboxes for the last hour or so, gathering up the old needle cutter parts to see what I need… to possibly bolt it onto the MPR&P…
I used to be slightly heavy into RC airplanes….never the big expensive club stuff but larger foamies at the local park. I did a bunch of FliteTest stuff too and had a blast with that as well. All good places to start.
I’ve been out of it for a while but lately I picked up a multiprotocol transmitter and some of these gyro stabilized micro-warbirds. They are fun to fly scale and SUPER easy. The gyro is almost TOO forgiving. You can turn it off, but without it they dont fly great without some modification. I am working on getting it to fly well without so I can do loops and rolls. But out of the box for a sunday flyer grab’n’go to fly some patterns they are GREAT. Don’t take up much space, batteries are small and cheap and still give healthy flight time.
They are all brushed motors, but they are starting to switch to brushless with a tad more wingspan but the price is going up accordingly.
I’m going to jump on this RC airplane band wagon. I used to watch a group fly and it was a great time. I personally did not build any airplanes but I was around to watch one or two get made and I will say, there’s a great deal that goes into the planes. It was good fun watching them fly! It is an exhilarating hobby with lots of ups and downs. Seeing a plane crash was sad sometimes but sometimes funny as well. I wish you all the best in your builds and flying.
I’ve got loads of time now! I finally left from toxic job, so I “only” take care of my kids and try to catch up with all those projects I wanted to do last few years.
dialing in the table saw I bought like year ago
installing programmable leds along my drive
building gate phone with print reader
fixing cat’s door (dog ate it)
glue ups from oak for cutting boards
making dog holes panel for cnc table
making k-pop sign for my daughter
aaaand preparing for halloween: making some lanterns
I know if I’d started the big tidy of 2025 at the other end of the garage, I’d have been able to make this with the LR, but I also know that I’d bury myself in some other distraction.
Shelf for the car cleaning gear and other odds and sods.
That’s the last of the left over flooring ply. Time to plan <ten years, time to make and dispose of the rubbish stacked against the wall - a few hours over a couple of days, and suddenly almost 20% of my wall space is clear!
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Shelf for the car cleaning gear and other odds and sods.
