short solent sea plane,100 bucks is not enough, lol

[road king 97]

I seen ivans short solent 480 about 5 years ago with ivan flying it through the mist and mountains behind it and wanted to build my own. My girlfriend was cleaning around my easy chair and lost the mag i had with ivans site in it but i found it a couple years later. I emailed ivan and had a set of hand drawn plans back in a couple weeks. I also found Luke Z,s build thread and was happy to see he took alot of pictures and had a great build log of the solent . I had just a phone camera for the first part of the build but you can make them out ,i hope.lol About me .I have been building and flying planes here in joliet IL for 35 years and was a carpenter for 29 years and now a boss in the company . Construction is very slow now and great time to build the solent. Here are some stats . Motors are 4-jamera 480 motors with gears boxes swinging 4- four bladed props . I will use one 50 amp esc with no bec and have a seperate battery for my rec. I will use a 2.4 radio but havent decided witch one yet i have a futaba fasst and a dx7 but cant make up my mind yet. Here is my build and some sites where you can order your own plans from ivan. Sorry for the picture sizes its from my cell phone. joe

[road king 97]

I worked on it fast at first and got the fuse and the wing almost looking like a airplane .

[road king 97]

I got the wing almost done and it was time to cut out the ail and build the wing tip floats. I put in blocks so i could use hing points for the ail. joe

[road king 97]

http://ivansplans.com/ He has alot of electrict planes and make sure you check out the weight out of his planes. joe

[road king 97]

http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=710485 Here is some other builds and videos of ivan himself flying his planes. joe

[road king 97]

Wing and motor mounts were fun to build but i had to keep wing at 5 degree pos and motor mounts at 1 degree neg. Dont mind my shop it was my maids day off. lmao joe

[road king 97]

The wing was straight forward and not to bad. joe

[road king 97]

I wasent looking foward to planking the wing necceles and building the cowls but it was not that bad,yea right.lol

[road king 97]

Iam not very good at planking but it had to be done.joe

[road king 97]

I have to bring upstairs and put it together ,my work shop is to small. joe

[gramps2161]

Roadking your build looks great are you using brushed motors with a gear box ? I can only see 2 wires that's why I asked. What is the wingspan looks like 5' at least.

[offtom]

I agree with Gramps.

Plane is looking great, you do good work. I was kind of wondering about the motors too.

[road king 97]

Yes brushed jamera 4-480 HS BB motors with 4-1-1 gear boxes ,i thought about putting high cost motors in but ivans flys well with this set up and i did not want to have to buy 4 esc,s and all of the extra wirering that goes with brushless motors. Gramps the fuse is 6ft and the wing span is 99inches .Ivan sells plans for a 80 inch solent and it is easyer to find motors for brushed and brushless. I have a big company van . joe

[Forge]

Road King,

Wow! I just saw your posting this morning. Your build looks awesome, I am subscribed. I will be watching this, thanks for putting this up online.

And, yes... $100 is not enough

Forge

[road king 97]

Thanks forge i have waited till now to post my build ,i just finished fiberglassing the bottom and half way up the sides and the tip floats were all glassed . I have never glassed alot so a flying friend of mine ,thanks merlyn , helped me as i did not want to put a hole bunch of weight on her.

[kevinm]

very,very,very nice work (and plane) -looks like a perfectly fair hull (do fuses get called hulls when they were made to sit on water?)

[road king 97]

Originally Posted by kevinm

very,very,very nice work (and plane) -looks like a perfectly fair hull (do fuses get called hulls when they were made to sit on water?)

Iam not sure but i have been saying fuse all of the time through my build .I know it took about 7 hours to carve the nose but last week i cut off about a 1 1/4 more cause i was getting ready to glass and it still looked like a ant eater me.lol joe

[rawy]

Nice Job Joe,

You have my admiration for your courage at glassing, this is something I do not really manage, the few times I had to glass something, the rest of the people around me need earplugs because I usually get mad with my fingers sticking on the wrinkles, the epoxy setting way too early and all the corners and angles showing bubbles

keep the good job, I'm in

walter

[road king 97]

Thanks walter but just because i have this thread going i am still watching your thread on making depron floats as iam foam stuped.http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showt...4#post17544470 The best way to make small floats i have seen yet. I did not want to take a chance of messing up with glassing it all messy so when my float flying buddy offerd i jumped at the chance. He used wests systems resin and it came out smooooth. I got a free glassing lesson and he would not take a dime for any thing . I owe him a free lunch when we go to some water funflys this summer. Thanks for the kind words walter. joe

[kevinm]

i had to 'glass my balsa planked steam powered tug , it was advised, so it would float, but i had no mentor or experience, but it was a necessary evil,. sticky mess i think i was supposed to thin the epoxy to be more paint-on-able

[road king 97]

Originally Posted by kevinm

i had to 'glass my balsa planked steam powered tug , it was advised, so it would float, but i had no mentor or experience, but it was a necessary evil,. sticky mess i think i was supposed to thin the epoxy to be more paint-on-able

I ask him the same thing ,if we thinned the resin for the first coat and he said that it makes the resin weak and flexible and he never thins it. He did however use credit cards and scrape allot of resin off on the first coat and the same on the second. I sanded it with 150 wet sand paper and it cut it nice till it was all smooth. I went to 400 and then 600 and thats good enough for me as i will cover it any ways. The tip floats iam going to primer fill and paint and not cover . NICE BOAT by the way kevin ,my brother works on tugboats 3 months on 3 months off. joe

[road king 97]

I put the turtle deck on the top of the wing to be flush with the fuse . It also has two 3/16 dowels in the front of the wing and a 1/4 nylon bolt in the rear,yes i said one bolt in the rear . I also put my finger through the wing again as you can see but iam use to this and will fix today. joe

[gramps2161]

looking good Joe glad to see I am not the only one with ham hands. Done stuff like that my self few times.
John

[LukeZ]

Hey Joe! Nice to see you start a thread. I'm not over on Wattflyer much so thanks for letting me know about it. I've put a link to this thread over on the Ivan thread list.

My first experience fiberglassing was on my Solent build, same as you. I used Z-Poxy resin and it turned out to be less challenging than I feared, though it was still somewhat frightening. I think the credit card squeegie trick is a good one.

You're closing in on the finish line, and just in time for spring too. I'll be looking forward to seeing this one in the air.


Luke

[road king 97]

Gramps i have replaced about every 3/16 stick on my fuse already from sticking my fat fingers through it .lol I wanted to show people that this happens and you just deal with it . Luke nice of you to drop in ,i remember you not looking forword to glassing yours in your build thread. I have used your great pictures from your build thread to get me this far and i thank you again for taking them and keeping them up so new ivans plane builders can use them as a tool to help them build theirs.