John Ranson Beaufighter

[Chris Freeman 3]

A while ago I bought a Beaufighter from a very well known Jet Modeller who had built the model to fly in scale events in South Africa as he had stopped flying jets and needed to keep active. On the 9th flight it crashed due to one of the brushless motors stopping! The airframe was given to another modeller who repaired it and flew it a number of times but was now moving to a smaller house and did not have space for it so he gave it back to Mark the original builder. Mark did not want to spend the time to get the airframe back to the standard he wanted so he put the airframe up for sale. Mark is in Durban and I am in Johannesburg which is over 500km away so I paid the money and Byron collected the airframe when he went on holiday to Durban a few weeks later.

 

When I received the airframe I had to spend time trying to figure out what is needed to get the aircraft flying as this will determine how much time I can afford to spend on it as some improvements can be made. Mark did a great job in the original construction with lots of nice detail but it is now quite a complex and heavy model. Lots of servos, leads and multi boxes are in the airframe along with a nice set of electric retracts. I am slowly getting things done and am making sure that I have a good understanding of the set up.

 

This is one project I have always wanted to build since the original article in one of the Traplet magazines many years ago and I even have a set of plans that Tony Stephenson gave me on one of his trips to this country.    

[stu knowles]

Lovely model.  Doesn't appear to be much damage.

 

[Adrian Smith 1]

Nice piece of kit there,Chris