DL 5 (oz14282)

About this Plan

DL 5. Radio control stand-off scale model Homebuilt plane. Wingspan 60 in. Scale is 1/5.

Quote: "A minimum home-built aircraft. Following the design of its full-size counterpart, the DL5 is a simple, quick building aircraft for .25-35 engines. By Paul F Denson.

The DL5 is an aircraft proposed by DM Livesey, an English home-built designer. It first appeared as a design in the July-August 1971 issue of Popular Flying which is the journal of the Popular Flying Association, the British equivalent of our United States Experimental Aircraft Association.

A Minimum home-built (quoting Mr Livesey is one that can reduce the building time of from 1500 to 2000 hours by removing the making of jigs, deciphering unnecessarily complex plans, and eliminating the innumerable hours running around looking for specific unobtainable aircraft supplies. And with spruce and birch ply becoming more and more rare, the use of standard marine ply.

What we need is a plane that is easily built, may be constructed in a standard garage, a minimum of tools, no fabric, covering and no welding. All wheels, seats, fuel tanks are to be commercially available, and this aircraft, when completed, will pass through a standard 2 ft 6in door. Don't laugh, more than one wall has been torn down to get a home-built boat or plane out to the light of day. Just ask me, I built a boat in my basement. Oh yes I did and it sailed quite well. It must be trailerable and can be stored in the above mentioned garage.

Our model is 1/5 stand-off scale, well not too far off. We did make modifications which conform to Romney Bukolt's Basic R/C Model Design Parameters as published in Jan '80 RCM in Ken Willard's column. An appropriate engine should be from .25 to .35. Controls are 4-channels; ailerons, throttle, rudder, and elevator.

The only thing that varies from full-scale are the lack of Warren type wing ribs as you can see in the cutaway drawing. The fuselage is a constant section 2 inch tube made up of four longerons. We found this made the fuselage easy to construct but, unlike the full-size plane, we needed room for non-scale servos and a fuel tank in the lower area. To find a place for them, it necessitated removal of the top center longerons from the seat back forward to the fire wall. The 1/8 lite ply sides more than made up for any loss in strength. The plans have been modified to show this change. Flaps were not used due to space limits.

Construction: We have found (and so has RCM's Chuck Cunningham) that the very inexpensive small size knives with the sliplock break-off blade is fantastic for all phases of modeling. They are available for around 75c in most hardware stores.

Fuselage: Cut all formers from the materials indi-cated, It will be necessary at this time to construct the combination of formers F-4 and F-5. They must he tilled top and bottom with 3/16 aircraft ply, leaving the center vacant for the insertion of the 3/36 ply wing tongue... "

Direct submission to Outerzone.

Scan by MarkD, cleanup by Circlip.

Update 28/12/2022: Replaced this plan with a clearer copy, thanks to Paul Sluce.

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