Not a Quad - Flitetest Nutball Scratchbuild

The quad has taken a back seat at the moment. Instead I have started to build a scratch-build RC plane to assist me to learn to fly.

I am a huge fan of the Flitetest guys and am going to start by building one of their Swappable Nutball scratchbuilds. I looked at buying the laser-cut kit but with postage it was going to cost me double the cost of the kit in postage to ship to Australia.

The plane is built from 5mm Foam Board. It is easy to work with and can be cut with a hobby knife.

First step was to print out and tape all the pages together to get a full size plan of what needed to be cut out of the board. Flitetest also supply a printable A1 version which you can get a printshop to print.

Using a sharp hobby knife, I cut each of the pieces out of the foam board. This plane only has three main pieces (fuselage, wing and stabilizer). Once the pieces have been cut, the next step was to make each of the control surfaces and form the dihedral in the wing. This was very simple following along with the build video created by the Flitetest team.

Once the wing was built, I formed up the basic power pod unit to test it fit into the slots in the wing. As my foam is 5mm and the plans are based on 4mm foam there was some slight adjustments to make everything fit.

Thats it for today. I need to wait for my electronics to be delivered to fit out the power pod and complete all the attachments for the wing to the power pod.

Thanks to the crew at Flitetest for a easy and cheap way to enter the RC flying hobby.