[Wildlabman]

Howdy all....

It's time for me to stop mostly being a lurker here and add a little modest content to the site...

Brad Egan is a friend and fellow club member and his very active thread in the Giant Scale section of this forum is very inspiring and informative. It actually got me to get off my butt and start a project of my own.
I have been talking about building a plane from a kit for a while now. For the most part, I have only really assembled ARFs (except for a trainer I partially built a few years ago). This past spring I bought an E-Flight L4 Grasshopper parkflier and I love the look of it and the way it flies. The only problem is it's soooo small that any wind at all makes it impossible to fly. I wanted something that flies similar but larger and able to handle most normal conditions. I also did not want your standard yellow Cub that everyone seems to have, I wanted something that looked different. After consulting with a great many people at my club it seemed that the best way to get what I wanted was for me to get a kit and build it myself. The prevailing consensus was that the SIG 1/5th kit was the best way to go. Unfortunately this ceased to be an option as SIG kits are now extremely difficult to find. The next best option was to go with the Great Planes 40 sized J3 Cub. After some more advice from the guys at my LHS (a little plug for Dave and Ron at Pinnacle Hobbies in Markham, you guys ROCK), I picked one up about a month ago.
Work scheduling and a lack of a few supplies has made it difficult to get going on the project until this weekend. I finally got all my ducks in a row and have begun the work. What follows is a log of that build. I hope people will join in on this thread and offer up some tips and suggestions on those difficult or tricky parts that all of these kits seem to have. This will be the first kit that I have built all the way to completion and I made at times need a little advice.

Anyway.....here's the specs of what I'm planing...

40 size J3 Cub kit to to be built with Clipped wings and powered by an OS 70 4 stroke.
I plan to finish the plane in mostly White covering with Red and Blue (I'm thinking a Union Jack motif on the top on the wing). I'm also planing to put over sized Tundra or Balloon wheels on it to make it a little more fun.

The next post will show the start of the build.

Chris Lee

[Wildlabman]

Yesterday, I finished the rudder and today I have begun work on the tail fin...

Here it is pinned down, waiting for the glue to set with the rudder next to it.





More to come as I do more...

Chris

[chuebner]

Good luck with your build... I will be following along.

I love Cubs, even the yellow ones! I clipped the wings on my GP .40 Cub last winter.... made a whole new plane out of it!

[Wildlabman]

Originally Posted by chuebner

Good luck with your build... I will be following along.

I love Cubs, even the yellow ones! I clipped the wings on my GP .40 Cub last winter.... made a whole new plane out of it!

Hi Curt,

What a nice looking Cub you have there...I like what you did with the pattern on the wings.

Don't get me wrong here, I like the yellow cubs and love to watch them fly....I just wanted to do something a little different with mine. Originally it was gonna be a larger L4 but I was reminded that it's MY plane built By ME and as such, I can do what ever I want, scale or not. So I decided to go a little bit off scale and do it up in a way that suits me (cosmetically only of course, I would not want to alter the fight characteristics). I also decided right at the start to make it a clipped wing, more fun that way.

Chris

[chuebner]

Thanks Chris, the sunbursts add a little pizzazz to the Cubby.

That is the nice thing about you covering it yourself.... you can do it in a scheme that will no doubt be unique and hopefully one of a kind, and not the typical ARF Cub Yellow that we all seem to have!

I like the blue clipped wing scheme also!

[Wildlabman]

Got a little more done earlier this week...

Built the Horizontal Stab.....



And the left Elevator half....



Along with the right Half....



The next step is to sand everything nice and smooth, drill and groove for the joiner wire. Then it's onto the wings, can't wait.

I do have one question...I'm not sure I want to use the fabric hinges that are supplied with the kit. I think I would rather use pin type hinges. I was wondering if anyone out there did this with their model and if so, what type/brand/size did you use? Also, are there any tips about using that type of hinge you could pass along. So far I have only used them to hinge small foam planes. Thanks in advance.

Chris

[dean2287]

Cool thread. I have one of these but I bought it already built, so I never really saw the "guts" of it. Great, easy flying plane, you'll enjoy it. Mine flies really well with a Saito 56, and can do loops etc no problem. A 70 fs should be tons of power, but if you ever go for floats it will come in handy.

[Bdegan]

Awsome Chris
Happy to see it started. For your Hinge question, I have come to like the Dubro style hinges.
The first time you use them is a bit tricky to get a good alignment.
But after you figure them out, they are great.
No resistence for the servos



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[Wildlabman]

Originally Posted by Bdegan

Awsome Chris
Happy to see it started. For your Hinge question, I have come to like the Dubro style hinges.
The first time you use them is a bit tricky to get a good alignment.
But after you figure them out, they are great.
No resistence for the servos

Thanks Brad...

However, after consulting with Dave at Pinnacle, I decided to go with Robart hinges. Them seem to the easiest to use (no need to cut slots, just drill holes) and are pretty reliable.

I did get some more work done today...

The Tail feathers are completed...





Got started on the wings....

It took a fair amount of time to get each rib out of the "punched" sheet they were in. It seems that the manufacturer doesn't make sure that each one punches all the way through...It took quite a bit of slow and careful work with the xacto to get them out.

Anyway, after all that I got the first couple of ribs in place on the spars...





The interesting thing was it took a lot of reading and rereading of the instructions at this point. Because this is a clipped wing, there are two spars left out of the build at this phase. The result is that what I have on the board looks quite different to the photos in the instruction manual (they show the full sized wing). I'm gonna have to be careful as I build since it seems this will be an issue throughout the building of the wings.

More tomorrow...

Chris

[Wildlabman]

More done today...

More ribs in place....





Top spar in place...



Wing tip and bracing added along with "shear bracing"....





Hopefully I can find time in the evening this week to get a little more done.

Chris