Stephens Akro (oz9854)

About this Plan

Stephens Akro. Radio control stand-off scale aerobatic model. For .61 power.

Quote: "One day while browsing in the local hobby shop and looking through a magazine, I chanced upon a picture of a delightful little plane, the full-sized homebuilt Stephens Akro. I had been searching for a good looking scale model that I could fly in Stunt contests., and this looked as if it might do the trick. It appeared very clean and had straightforward lines that would make it easy to build - and best of all it looked as if it would be a great flyer. Now, that's really important.

If a plane looks as if it will fly well there is nothing to do except start drawing the plans and get things rolling. Right? Wrong! First you have to do a little research, such as finding some 3-views. Nothing was available,so I dropped a line to Stephens Aircraft and received a packet from them which included 3-views factory drawn to a scale of 1/8. I then proceeded to scale the drawings up 1-3/4 times to make the size of the model.

The original Stephens Akro was designed as a fully stressed acrobatic competition air-plane. It is just now becoming more popular and starting to appear around the country. Some pictures in the packet show some of the construction details as well as finished planes, and they are extremely well built.

This served to get me steamed up, so I started, in my own style, doing the drawings right on the balsa. Why waste time, right? Then I weakened and drew the wing pattern on paper so I could get a foam core cut. I needed to get going as quickly as possible because I had decided to go to the Nats (1974) and wanted to fly this thing in Scale, since they finally were including Stand-off that year. Mine are great Stand-off Scale models (that is, if you stand off far enough) but who cares, the name of the game is fun.

That is the way I got started; if you have a mind to start one too, let's get the ball rolling. You will have to build the wing fairly early to be able to fit it to the fuselage. The original was foam, thanks to the coaxing of Bob Upton. The plans show the root and tip rib for the foam wing fans, and for the built-up troops we have ours, too, so do whatever type you like. Keep the top of the wing flat and let the bottom taper for the dihedral. The built-up version does not show the spar cutouts in the ribs..."

Stevens Akro, MAN, December 1975.

Direct submission to Outerzone.

Supplementary file notes

Article pages, thanks to RFJ.

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