Rebel (oz9604)

About this Plan

Rebel. Free flight power sport model, for Ohlsson Gold Seal engine.

Quote: "In the midst of the current boom in full-size antique airplanes and the commemoration of famous flights of long ago, I suddenly realized that my old 'Rebel' free-flight gas model design was 27 years old as of last May and that I still have a flyable example around. I dug through old scrapbooks and managed to assemble a set of photos of the whole series. Covering a considerable period of model history and showing as they do the gradual improvements made through the evolution of a basic design, I thought they would be of interest to younger model builders and bring back memories to some of the older ones, active or retired.

The original Rebel of 1937, my 6th free flight gassie, turned out to be one of those happy designs that had just the right combination of conservative and proven aerodynamic features, rugged and simple construction, and eye appeal that produces a reliable and memorable model. The editor of Air Trails (which became American Modeler) ran pictures of it in the November 1937 and February 1938 issues. It held its own in the contests of its day, and along with such contemporaries as the Comet Clipper (oz7380) and Berkeley Buccaneer (oz5444) is suitable for utility flying and R/C work today. While this article might give the impression that I built nothing but Rebels after 1937, I did turn out lots of other stuff, but the appeal of Rebel was such that I always went back to it.

Even when first built, the original Rebel was not a new design. It borrowed heavily from two well-known 1936 designs, Rod Doyle's Folly that won the 1936 California State Championship (Jr Div) and Roy Mayes' Jeep, a somewhat similar design with a realistic cabin. The major feature of each was the triangular fuselage construction.

The dimensions of all three craft were pretty well determined by the state of the art at the time. It was still the day of measured fuel contests, by that time down to 1 cc of gasoline per pound of plane weight. The Baby Cyclone, a .35 with rotary valve, had appeared at the end of 1935 to challenge the near monopoly of the Brown Jr. With less power than the Brown, the Cyclone ships had to be much lighter, and to overcome the short-fuel handicap they had to be smaller to have a higher rate of climb than the Brown jobs. This set the span of most of the Baby Cyke jobs, and the Rebel, at six feet. The old L2/100 rule (fuselage length squared, divided by 100) was still with us then, so performance was not compromised by having a full fuselage with realistic cabin windows and windshield. This was before the appearance of Carl Goldberg's pylon Zipper, and when gas model airplanes looked like real airplanes. Wing loading rules were just coming in, but hadn't been adopted in Northern California at the time, so Rebel One was built as light as possible. Fitted with batteries, coil, condenser, and an Autoknips photo-timer hooked to a slide switch, it weighed in at two and one-half pounds... "

Scan from DBHL, cleanup by theshadow.

ref DBHL-7021.

Direct submission to Outerzone.

Update 29/12/2017: added article (from 1965 American Modeler Annual), thanks to RFJ.

Supplementary file notes

Article.

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