Drawing a plan for possible publication

[graeme jones]

Part One -

There must be many of us who design our own models. There must be many who build from those designs, but never make it to publication?

I am one of the many, having been designing for nearly fifty years and even building some of them. Here's one I made (much) earlier -

Designed and built about ten years ago, it's a model to carry a small digital camera for airborne video. It predates FPV of course and the "plan" was only ever a few lines on the back of a bit of wallpaper to build the wing panels. Everything else was drawn on the wood.

Fast-forward to 2012 and I was putting together a design for an aerobatic model, intending to build two, one for IC and one for electric. It's a bit more complex than my camera plane so all of it was drawn on paper. I then started wondering, as I'm sure many "own-designers" have, whether RCM&E would be interested in publishing it. An email to the editor confirmed that they would.

Back in the early 1980's, I had a couple of plans published in Model Boats magazine, so I knew roughly what was needed. Apart from building the models, the process would have to include drawing a detailed plan to a high enough standard and making a photographic record of the building and flying. So, what would be involved in going from this -

to this -

?

More in part 2.

Graeme

[Tim Hooper]

Excellent idea for a thread, Graeme.

Like you, I'm strictly a pen and paper man, which seems to be perfectly adequate for submission to this fine and august periodical. Their CAD guru can work wonders with my crayoned daubs.

The hard part is getting build photos of Vogue quality, good enough to satisfy the management.

Good luck!

tim

[Concorde Speedbird]

Posted by Tim Hooper on 01/04/2013 21:31:04:

Excellent idea for a thread, Graeme.

Like you, I'm strictly a pen and paper man, which seems to be perfectly adequate for submission to this fine and august periodical. Their CAD guru can work wonders with my crayoned daubs.

I too am pen and paper, I like to have the design physically in front of me. But I may try CAD as I move on to become an Aviation engineer, because that is what they use now in full size aviation so I will have to get to grips with it. But I will always prefer to break out the pencils!

CS

[TheFlyingCrust]

CSB. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE! Will you be changing your name to Vulcan Velocity?

Like the new avatar - but it ain't Concorde.

As for designing, I'm getting too old in the tooth to learn CAD although I could get one of my offsprings to do the work for me. I have ideas of a design buzzing around my head so when I get the time (!) I'll design a glider - perhaps sometime in the next decade

Ian

[Tom Sharp]

If you want to get published, build your model and take it round the fly-ins, the mag reps will be there looking for new models.

[Concorde Speedbird]

Posted by Rentman on 02/04/2013 00:31:09:

CSB. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE! Will you be changing your name to Vulcan Velocity?

Like the new avatar - but it ain't Concorde.

Ha ha ha, no I'm always Concorde but I'll be keeping that Avatar for now just because this could be XH558's final year of flight, and they are struggling for funding at the moment so it will go back to a different picture of Concorde some time later this year. It's similarish to Concorde?!

CS

[graeme jones]

Part Two -

So, I had the idea of publishing the plan, what would I need to actually do it?

1. To CAD or not to CAD, that was the question. In the past I've always used pencil and paper, apart from wing and tail ribs where I've used the excellent Compufoil Professional since 1999. I keep a Dell Dimension P120 to run it on (Windows 95), how many of today's PC's will still work in 2027 I wonder? So I downloaded a couple of CAD programs onto my laptop and played about with them. Each came with a large pdf instruction file and regettably would have taken longer to learn than drawing the plan by hand, so pencil and paper it was.

2. What to draw on was the next question, solved by a trip to a local print/copy shop where I bought some heavy duty tracing paper. That also solved the problem of copying what I already had on the back of a roll of cheap wallpaper, by tracing and adding more detail.

3. Photographs. I mentioned above that I had a couple of boat plans published 30 years ago. The photographs for those were in black and white taken with a Pentax film camera. Remember those? Our esteemed editor required something a bit more modern i.e. digital with high resolution. My camera at the time was a JVC HDD camcorder which, although it has a zoom lens good enough to photograph a 747 at 30000 feet, only takes one megapixel photographs and doesn't have a macro facility. One copy of What Camera and a trip to ASDA later I was the owner of a Fuji S2980, with more pixels than you can shake a stick at and a reasonable lens. Like a lot of modern gadgets I will probably never need half of it's functions, but for the price it takes reasonable pics. I already had a tripod which would eliminate camera shake.

So in June 2012 I started building two prototypes (one IC one electric remember), refining the plan and taking lots of photos as I went along. I also made notes for the build article . Didn't quite finish them in time for last season's flying weather so I had a long frustrating wait over the winter, finally flying them on 4 March 2013.

More next time

Graeme

[Mike Etheridge 1]

Graeme,

I would still recommend you draw out your plan and get a CAD expert to copy it on a program like 'Auto-Cad' it could then be easily published.

Near Avicraft in Bromley located in the same road is a firm of printers who can print off any Auto-CAD drawing from a CD disc. Alternatively you can E-mail them the drawings so that they can copy them. I would imagine most print companies can carry out the same exercise but with the better known professional CAD software rather than the cheap versions.

Mike

 

Edited By Mike Etheridge 1 on 04/04/2013 15:33:51

[Greybeard]

Why not ask the magazine editor what they require.

[Mike Etheridge 1]

Since the CAD issue came up again about a month ago I downloaded a month's free trial of Microstation V8. It proved to be absolutely no use to me unless I had a drawing to open. So I opened an old Auto-CAD drawing successfully and was able to use the fencing tool to print off an A4 plan as below. I was also able to open a complete site plan of the local authority where I once worked and with the fencing tool copy off an A4 selection. If I had known an actual dimension of any one of the buildings shown I could have selected a drawing to a particular scale by using the CAD measuring tool.

Now if you design a model aircraft and have a CAD plan produced you could easily scale up or down the size of the plane very easily which of course you cannot do with pen and paper.

Edited By Mike Etheridge 1 on 04/04/2013 16:12:31

[graeme jones]

Thanks for the responses.

Mike - I don't know any "CAD experts" but thanks for the suggestion.

Greybeard - RCM&E haven't said they require CAD and I have been emailing the editor for some months now to check on requirements. I will check that specific point with him though, so thanks for that.

Graeme

[Peter Miller]

I draw on AO sheets of drawing paper. Actually when they stopped using individual sheets I bought a 50 metre roll of copy paper.

I do a pencil drawing on that until I am satisfied with it. Then I do an ink tracing and have a print done. I build from this and then correct any final errors. The final print is sent to the editor.

I use Compufoil to design the wings and print this out and tape it down. I then have to add the small details like servos and bellcranks etc. This is then traced in the same way as the pencil drawing

A good digital camera will take all the construction pictures and the static shot.

For flying pictures you really need a digital SLR and a 300 mm lens.

[Stephen Jones]

Hi ,

Getting a plan published is not as simple as it may seem it would appear that some mags may not be interested in youre work if you have posted pictures on-line or done a build blogg on any kind of forum .or as you have already mentioned taken bad pictures .

Not only that it may not be of interest to one mag but maybe to another .

So is best not to post any info about any models you plan , until you have done the plan , build , build pictures and flown it .

That way you increases youre chance of getting it published .

Good Luck .

[Myron Beaumont]

Nobody would be interested in my decimated pieces of brown wrapping paper having designed A/C and built them .I did two years in the drawing office at RR by the way .Just what is this CAD thing & how can it help me put on paper what is in my head & I can draw out for myself? To me ,it's part of the fun in aeromodelling ,

Myron YO13 olduns analogue dept

Edited By Myron Beaumont on 04/04/2013 18:57:00

[Mike Etheridge 1]

Graeme--if you need any CAD work doing I could probably arrange it---you would just need to send me any drawing. The CAD result could then be E-mailed to you and you could then forward on the CAD file to any publisher. You could also transfer the CAD file to a CD disc and take it to your local printers as required.

In 1997 I was faced with having to cope with CAD (Microstation SE) at work. The managers threw away all our drawing boards (Mine is now a modelling board) and my Rotring tracing pens became redundant. To get my schemes finished on time I just marked up drawings and others did the CAD work. On one scheme a new swimming pool, I produced all the tender electrical drawings on plastic film,but the architect would not accept them and they were reproduced in CAD. Eventually I did a complete scheme on my own in CAD-.It took ages. However most of us were made redundant in 2001 just as I had got the hang of Microstation CAD. I then became self employed and worked for a number of consultants only to find they all used Auto Cad so I was back to square one! Also it seems that large companies have their own CAD empires that closely guard their work and who carries it out.

Myron once you get the knack CAD will enter your head and it can be fun!

Mike.

[graeme jones]

Part Two Additional -

4. Imperial or Metric? This didn't need too much thought since balsa normally comes in imperial sizes. Liteply though comes (usually) in metric e.g 3mm, so I ended up working in millimetres in places but mostly using inches. Strangely the last sheet of liteply I bought as 2mm is actually 3/32" thick, while the 3mm sheet is 3mm thick.

Responses - Again thanks for the inputs. Peter Miller appears to use much the same methods as I have, so I must be doing something right! I appreciate the point re. not putting on-line anything which might jeopardise copyright, which is why most of what appears here won't be part of any build article. Also, I did think to check with the editor before I started. As far as Computer Aided Design is concerned, I would love to learn how to use it. Trouble is my time is taken with building and flying. Perhaps next winter?

Graeme

[Tim Hooper]

Graeme,

Don't over think this.

This mag (RCM+E) is happy to receive a hand-drawn plan. They will convert it to a CAD file for publication.

Use whatever mixture of metric and Imperial units suit you. I use both.

Don't worry about posting pics here in the form of a build blog. I do it all the time, and it's become part of the 'package'.

Talk to the editor.

tim

[Stephen Jones]

Tim ,

You're builds and Pictures are impeccable , And no Publisher would refuse you're work for those reasons alone .

But we all don't have the same abilities , what might be one persons best May be poor to others .

And glossy mags are looking for the best that they can get , lets face it a tacky model may fly well but would not adorn the covers of any self respecting mag , and same goes for bad pictures , and so would be refused

And once a build has gone public would be of no interest to any other mags that may of considered a less than perfect example .

P.S .

Have you approached any other mags after posting pictures on here .

There is a reason why we don't see build bloggs before Publication .

[Stephen Jones]

There are many reasons why a model may be refused , They may consider they have too many spitfires for instance , or free flight models aren't what they are about and so on .

So why limit you're opportunities when you could approach others .

[Peter Miller]

I have been told of designers who sent in plans rough drawn on old lining paper and they got published.

Obviously the better the submitted package the less work that the editorial staff have to do and therefore the more likely it is to be accepted.

I would say that your first plan should be something a little different.

My first was a fully aerobatic control line biplane together with an article on the d esign formula that I had developed for that type of model. I went on to sell similar plans to two American magazines.

A friend submitted a control line autogyro which was accepted. Again, different and eye catching.

Build blogs are fine although I would not put a blog on this forum and then send the plan to another magazine. Mentioning them here is not a problem

Edited By Peter Miller on 06/04/2013 08:17:29

[Greybeard]

The last time I did this sort of thing I did much as Peter did only my drafting paper was a roll of wallpaper lining paper.

About that time I got to know a chap called Brian Peckham who lived near Epsom Downs. Brian was a prolific designer who was known to go through the design, build and article preparation in about a week when the then RCME editor, David Boddington had a gap and a deadline to hit; although he preferred a little longer. Brian’s designs were rather formulaic so the designwork was limited to cosmetic factors. I’m sure many must remain in the plans listing, so may be worth looking at. I never did see any of the drawings that Brian sent in so don’t know if he did the final drawings or these were done in-house.

I seem to remember that an article of his was published showing the calculations and relationship between flying surfaces that he used, maybe something similar could be published.

[Masher]

I'm not a magazine editor, but if I was I would be interested in receiving new ideas and plans in any format or style. Two main reasons:

1) The mags are full of ready built models from foam or wood making the distributors very happy and readers bored. To me, it's just another after another with little changing apart from the colour and cost. When the new mags come out, i go straight for the plan built articles

2) I think like everything else these days, everything is getting a bit too perfect - a format has evolved for the article with very high quality plans and details. Wouldn't it be refreshing to see more variable formats? See how different people approach their designs - even more rough sketches charting the development etc

[graeme jones]

Masher - I agree with your point re. ARTF reviews, it's one of the reasons I decided to submit a plan for publication. There were other reasons, e.g. we tend to see similar designs from the same few people. I'm hoping to encourage others to have a go as well. Expand the gene pool as it were.

Editor has now confirmed that pencil and paper are fine. Where do people get their info. I wonder?

Graeme

[Richard v.K.]

Nice topic, looking forward to more info.

A while ago, I have started to build a model based on an existing, relative unknown airplane. My information comes from a French book. Some parts are build from scratch, most details are hand-drawn first. For some parts I made Acad drawings to have the plywood parts CNC-cut.

As things evolved, it became a project on its own: The design of a scale-model and make it suitable for reproduction. From concept to the complete, well-documented package from which a model can be built.
The whole thing is an extension of the modelling hobby itself. Albeit unfortunate that the time spent is at the expense of the time available to build models.

I was wondering, how long would it take a designer to translate all my info into a good plan in digital format?

[Peter Miller]

Just do your own drawings on paper and send them in.

You will need passable drawings with legible lettering but NOT to draughtsman standard by a long way. You will need photos of the construction, the completed model and the model in flight and a text describing the history, the construction and how the model flies.

I know of pencil drawings done on old wallpaper rolls.

Basically this is the work that you are getting paid for and the magazine will get the drawings redrawn to suit their layout etc.

Edited By Peter Miller on 01/05/2014 11:02:07