Austerity BF109G

[Scott Edwards 2]

I've always fancied a 1/5 BF109G so looked at the price of cut plans like the Dave Platt one. I was astonished ! About £470 for the cut parts, plan and a couple of plastic mouldings ! Yikes !! I'm not that rich, and being a natural cheapskate decided to see how little I could do it for by picking up bits and pieces here and there.

Plan from Ebay was £13, Cowling was £35 from a chap in Poland, Canopy was a tenner from Vortex Vacforms plus a bundle of balsa from SLEC. I reckon I got all of the airframe and bits in for well under £100, that's about 20% of a cut kit price.

It's not going to win any scale competitions, and it's a bit wonky here and there, but goes to show that by using the small cottage industries that still exist, you can spend 6 months knee deep in balsa dust for a tiny fraction of the flashy moulded stuff you can pay thousands for and have delivered the next day.

It's now ready to prime and paint, AUW is looking like 17lb with a Laser 180 and Lado electric retracts. Going for the evil looking sand brown Tropical scheme.

[ken anderson.]

well done Scott ,true aero modelling as we used to do in the days of being pink lint(skint) ..

ken anderson...ne..1...pink lint dept.

[Dave Hess]

Nice one! It's so much more satisfying when you build from basics. I have to admit that now I have more money than time, so I'm tending towards ready-made foam planes. Shame on me! However, I did recently dig all my old aeromedelling tools out of the shed and I still have a massive stock of balsa sheets and strips, etc.

I built a few nice models from plans, which I was too tight to buy. One of them was from a 6" x 4" picture of a plan in RCME, which I photocopied and used the increase size function on the photocopier to blow it up to 8 times the size on A4 paper, then tiled it to make the complete plan. It was an Envoy, which I built for a Vintage competition at Wings and wheels in about 1987. It was plan RM312 - Envoy. Mine was increased to 48" wingspan instead of the original 40":

I've done similar with KeilKraft models. I photocopied the formers and things like that and I redrew the main features of the plan as an outline by simple measuring and scaling. You have to adjust cutout sizes for stringers and things like that, so you only need the outline of the formers and their positions. This method works well to get the general outline and shape of the model. You still need a bit of experience to judge wood sizes/types and where to sheet etc.

As an aside, I traced some of the KeilKraft kits and made laser plots to cut them out. From memory I have the Hurricane, Competitor, Achilles, Ace or Playboy and a few others. I used to run a small aeromodelling club at the school, where we had a decent laser cutter. The kids these days don't have the patience to cut things out accurately. maybe the same goes for most adults too. It seems to be only those of us that cut our teeth on KeilKraft kits in the '50s and '60s that can do it now.

 

Edited By Dave Hess on 21/08/2018 11:07:57

Edited By Dave Hess on 21/08/2018 11:17:56

[Jon H]

Looks good to me, makes me want to engage it in 'combat'. I have a 5th scale La7 or P39 to choose from

[Andy Blackburn]

Does Mrs Scotty know about the illegal and provocative use of the kitchen table?

A.

[Scott Edwards 2]

Well, one of the first rules of aeromodelling applies: What the wife never finds out about, you can get away with 😁

[Ace]

Very nice Scott, I love the alternative to cheque book modeling especially when the results look that good