Cheap Plane

[Dave Hess]

I built a Flitetest Simple Scout 4ch version. It's made of three sheets of foam board at £2.50 a sheet. The motor is from a quadcopter set. You get 4 motors, ESCs and 8 propellers for £31:50. I reckon that they could work on any foam-board plane up to about 48*, provided that you don't want to do hovering, etc.

**LINK**

The receiver was a cheapo Banggood Frsky compatible one, and the 4x9g Emax ES08A11servos were the most expensive part of the plane at £17 for 4. The only other things I needed was some 0.9mm wire for the pushrods and some thicker wire for the undercarriage.

The plane was built from one of their many free plans.

**LINK**

They have Youtube instructions for all of their plans:

**LINK**

I printed it on my A4 printer, then taped all the sheets together, selotaped them to the boards with magic selotape (can be unpealed) and cut out all the bits. Everything is glued with a hot-melt glue gun. It took about 3 evenings to build into a flying plane.

I flew it today for the first time. The motor has immense power, so it can climb vertically directly from take off as high as you want. Overall, it flew pretty well for a relatively small plane. With the throttle reduced, it flew like a trainer, but the huge thrust gave a bit of a torque reaction, so not very well setup for pattern aerobatics, but a good fun-fly nevertheless.

This was my first foam board plane, and I have 2 more built and another two on the building board. If you only fly for fun, these seem to be an excellent low-cost solution.

I also bought a couple of their laser-cut speed-build kits. If you push out all the foam parts, you get left with a stencil that you can use to mark out another build or three. That makes repairs really simple and cheap. You can knock up a whole fuselage in a couple of hours; however, this stuff makes a pretty robust plane that can survive crashes that others couldn't.

The ding in the wing is from an accident ion the workbench during testing, when the motor fired up and jumped into the plane.

Edited By Dave Hess on 17/10/2018 16:58:19

[fly boy3]

Nice looking model Dave. What size are the boards, and power train details if possible. Cheers

[nigel newby]

This looks like great fun.

As a total dipstick to the way things are now made, what sort of foam board are we talking about are where can you get it from.

Nigel

[Nigel R]

Nice one Dave. What does the motor setup draw, I guess about 100W?

nigel n -

You can get foamboard from HobbyCraft

https://www.hobbycraft.co.uk/white-foam-board-a1/539724-1000

4 big A1 sheets for £10. They also sell cheap hot melt glue guns.

I'm using the same stuff to make a Flying Carpet at the moment.

[Dave Hess]

The power train is detailed in the first link in my post above. I was using a 3S lipo 1100mAh.

I'll measure the current later when I've charged my batteries. My guess from the way it pulls my calibrated arms when you open the throttle is closer to 200W.

The foam board is from Flitetest themselves in USA. I bought a box of 50 sheets from them with some other stuff,but by the time you add on shipping and duty, it comes close to the price you can get it from EBay/Amazon. It's waterproof and very easy to work with. I tried some white UK boards, but they were stiffer and not easy to make curved for things like wings. Here it is. I've seen it for £2.50 per sheet somewhere, possibly Amazon:

**LINK**