Wakefield Winner (oz9310)

About this Plan

Wakefield Winner. Rubber competition model.

Quote: "Exclusive drawings for both Foster's 1953 and 1954 designs. If any ship in the world today can be called the plane to beat, this is it. Built and flown properly, it almost guarantees limit flights.

The development of this design started in 1950 after we heard that Aarne Ellila had won the Wakefield with a geared model. Joe Bilgri, a very good friend and flying partner and myself put together a configuration of old Wakefield parts to check the possibilities of a return gear design. At this time we were only interested in the power flight and with 4.5 oz of T56 in a 4 oz airframe, we noticed that there were no great visible dividends being paid off on the initial flights. We were not discouraged, though, and the possibility of getting away from the headaches of tensioned motors led each of us to build a gear job for the coming 1951 eliminations. It was in January '51 when these ships were completed. The designs were similar and used the same power: 20 strands of T56, 27 in long. Although both ships were steady fliers with fair climbs, we considered them failures as they would do only 3:30 at best.

We then abandoned the gears and put single skein White tensioned motors in these ships. Test flights showed an improvement of about 30 seconds in each case. I was quite lucky to qualify for the semi-finals with my ship getting only one good flight out of three because of bad knotting conditions. A month later Manny Andrade and myself won the semi-finals with long jobs to qualify for the finals in Finland.

It was disappointing to find that the Finnish dead air that we had heard so much about in the 1950 contest was non-existent in 1951 and our long ships trimmed for maximum glides with very large circles were certainly not windy weather combinations.

Almost immediately upon our return home the problem of attaining a five minute all-weather airplane was tackled. My idea was to find some way of circling a long model tightly without sacrificing the glide. I was not destined to do much experimenting along these lines for I had become engaged to the girl who is now my wife. During this period, model building for me was practically non-existent. However, this was not so for Joe Bilgri who was spending a great deal of time on a brand new approach to the geared design. In the fall of 1951 he appeared at our test flying site with what we considered at the time a super light geared model with 6.75 oz. of Perelli rubber. My first impression of the ship was that it lacked the necessary glide for five minutes even though the climb was terrific. Joe continued work on the ship and later reduced the power to 6 oz of rubber, bringing the total weight down to 9.25 oz. The ship began to show great promise as it neared perfect trim. I must admit that it took a lot of convincing before I realized that this design was the answer to our all-weather five minute airplane.

In 1952 Joe had little trouble getting through our regionals and semi-finals to win his place on the Wakefield team and I be-lieve if it were not for unusually bad luck in Sweden he could have been an easy winner. While this was all going on I was busy , getting married, buying a house, and attending to the thousand and one details that go along with these. The first of the year in 1953 I again started work on a Wakefield. It was apparent to me that in order to compete in this year's event I must have a ship at least as good, if nor better than, Joe's model. So my problem was to improve on his design, if possible.

First of all, there was the weight problem. Getting a ship at 3.25 oz with gears and still strong enough for most reasonable weather was the first headache. A few changes in construction came to me immediately; these were slightly more beefy wing and tail. I accomplished this in two ways. First, the aspect ratio was reduced slightly in both cases and the leading edge design and spar locations were improved. The biggest apparent design change was the use of the box fuselage in preference to the diamond. I may get arguments here, but I believe it to be a more streamlined arrangement and stronger for landings as two longerons meet the ground instead of one.

Other very small and insignificant alterations were made here and there. Generally speaking, I tried to clean the design up a little. The ship was covered with red Japanese tissue and given four coats of non-plasticized dope, thinned down of course. The weight came out as I had hoped: 3.25 oz. without rubber. There is no use going into the construction as it will do no good under next year's rules. However, it may help you new builders if I give you some of the changes I will probably make on next year's design..."

Wakefield Winner, MAN, January 1954.

Direct submission to Outerzone.

Supplementary file notes

Article pages, thanks to RFJ.

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