Sickle (oz7933)

About this Plan

Sickle. CL combat model. For Fox .15 Schneurle.

Quote: "Even if you don't happen to like the design, the techniques which the author has developed for mass production of a somewhat expendable type of aircraft, will probably be of interest. Sickle, by Steve Fauble.

What makes a good combat flyer? If you're not one of the very fortunate few who was blessed at birth with nerves of steel, the reflexes of a gunfighter, and the eyesight of an eagle, you must practice. This means flying actual matches with their accompanying whumps, thuds, and sudden silence. All of these sounds mean that you must lock yourself in your room and build more airplanes. These new planes will, in all too short a time, end up in the trash can with their brethren.

In order to make this building as painless a process as possible, I have tried to design a production capability into my planes. What you see in this FAI Combat plane, the 'Sickle', is the end result of many months of thinking, testing, and actively trying different techniques to reduce building time.

The first thing I decided was that cutting all those ribs then sheeting the leading edges, etc had to go. This left a foam wing, of one type or another, as the alternative. I built a couple of planes using the now standard method of a top and bottom spar set into a groove cut in the foam. I felt that in order to get the spar to fit correctly, too much time was required. I next decided to cut the foam wing in half, length-wise, at the highpoint, and simply sandwich a spar, full depth, in be-tween the two pieces of foam. This worked well, but the spar was heavy, and if balsa was used, expensive.

This is when I remembered an article in an old Model Airplane News. This article, by Bill Northrop, who is now the editor/publisher of Model Builder, had described an interesting technique. He had de-signed a biplane called the 'Spruce Goose' and in this article, he described how he had formed a block of spruce into a rib shape, complete with lightening holes in the center, and then simply sliced off completed ribs on a table saw..."

Quote: "Attached is a F2D plan of mine from years ago. The main feature is the ability to make many of the parts as a block and then slice off the individual parts using a table saw."

Direct submission to Outerzone.

Supplementary file notes

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