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Speed,Combat,Scale,Racing => Combat => Topic started by: Terrence Durrill on December 19, 2011, 01:59:27 PM
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WORST CONTROL LINE COMBAT PLANE OF ALL TIME..........................
My pick is THE EXTERMINATOR with a Super Tigre G-21 .35 out of Cincinnati, Ohio..............circa 1967.
While simple to build, his little jewel had a very small wing area. Adding to the misery was the fact it had a diamond airfoil. It was really fast on the straight, but turned lake a Mac truck. Fast on the straight and 75 cents will buy you a bag of Doritos, but will not win you a combat match against any kind of a competent combat flier. LL~ LL~ LL~
WHAT'S YOURS? S?P LL~ D>K
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Anything with a diamond airfoil.
Most of the early models with upright engines.
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Midwest Hornet.
Built one. Figured I did something wrong. Tried again. No better.
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Unmodified Winder. Wing fold king-
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Demeco All American Combateer. By far the worst. Very asemetrical in all directions and plans called for WAY too much control for a stabalator.
Try it you WON'T like it
Bigiron
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Demeco All American Combateer. I am not a great pilot nor do I have any combat experience. Strickly a sport flier. Seemed as if it would be an interesting plane to build & fly. I did & I tried with no luck. Anyone want to buy a Combateer?
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Unmodified Winder. Wing fold king-
If the wing folded, you didn't put enought fiberglass on it. A good Winder weighed in at 24 oz, including about 6 oz. of glass across the centersection to keep the wings on.
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A 3/32" plywood LE doubler across the center section solved the Winder wingfold problem with very little weight increase. I still have one Winder left (pacifier pod) of the four "moded" ones I built; just checked it on the digital scale at 10.2 ounces without a motor.
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It is funny reading about the guys and the folding wings on their combat planes. Being in the Flying Eagles Club we all used spruce spars and glassed the center sections on all our combat planes. H^^
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Only combat plane I ever folded the wings on (without outside help of course) was Riley Wooten's Vampire, (hmmmm is that the right name?), his early foamie with tagboard covering and no spar, or any longitudinal elements for that matter. It was a 2-piece wing, I think it had some splice pieces at LE and TE, mostly for alignment, and about a 6" "spar" in the center to anchor the bellcrank. A little bitty 1/2" wide strip of tagboard over the center seam was supposed to hold it together. It flew great until it folded--and it always folded. Hey it was early early foam (mid sixties?), what did we know?
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I remember that one, as the hobby shop owner wanted me to build it let him know if it was worth stocking it. I didn't fold the wing myself flying it, but another modeler flew it until it met it's demise with terra ferma. H^^
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Only combat plane I ever folded the wings on (without outside help of course) was Riley Wooten's Vampire, (hmmmm is that the right name?), his early foamie with tagboard covering and no spar, or any longitudinal elements for that matter. It was a 2-piece wing, I think it had some splice pieces at LE and TE, mostly for alignment, and about a 6" "spar" in the center to anchor the bellcrank. A little bitty 1/2" wide strip of tagboard over the center seam was supposed to hold it together. It flew great until it folded--and it always folded. Hey it was early early foam (mid sixties?), what did we know?
The Vampire won several Nats, as I recall.
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Yes and in all three age classes if I remember correctly.
I flew a lot of them and never folded a wing that I had not previously punched into the ground and weakened it.
Bigiron
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Yes and in all three age classes if I remember correctly.
I flew a lot of them and never folded a wing that I had not previously punched into the ground and weakened it.
Bigiron
You guys are better builders than me I guess... my brother and I had 4, 2 apiece, and folded every one within 2-3 flights. Well, a couple just wrinkled but we put them aside, one more flight would have done it. We kept trying because they flew so well until...
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It took awhile for all of us to figure out the proper way(s) to hold an engine on to a foam wing combat plane. Once that was accomplished, however, it changed the face of combat significantly.
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You guys are better builders than me I guess... my brother and I had 4, 2 apiece, and folded every one within 2-3 flights. Well, a couple just wrinkled but we put them aside, one more flight would have done it. We kept trying because they flew so well until...
I flew Riley's foam wing bloodsuckers (Vampires) in competition, (including the 1966 and 1968 Nats) for several years and never had one come apart in mid-air. The secret to keeping them together was using plenty of glue and insuring solid attachments in joining the wings. My choice was Hobbypoxy and Elmer's White Glue. Vampires performed extremely well if set up correctly. Riley won First Place at the 1968 Olathe, Ks Nats Open Combat Event, flying his Vampires. My Vampires, built from Riley's Flite Line kits, got me a 5th place finish behind "The Man" that year in Open Combat at Olathe. The Flite Line Vampires were first class airplanes for that era, if built correctly. D>K H^^
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WORST CONTROL LINE COMBAT PLANE OF ALL TIME..........................
COMBAT CATS...
Won a local contest sponsored by a LHS in S.C. while I was in the USAF. The 1st prize was a G2135 and a box of 2 Combat Cats (Kittens?). After suffering through the building, I realized that they would not survive a slight hit. I was right. I gave them to another airman friend and we had a midair while practicing (yeah, we were crazy...). My Nemesis II flew through it. One thing that made the Nemesis a very hard airplane to destroy was its leading edge tapered I-beam spar. A very ingenious design of the times...
BEST CONTROL LINE COMBAT PLANE OF THE 70's-80's.................................. NEMESIS II
Loved the plane. The one thing that turned me away from fast combat in the end was the expensive engines that one had to buy to be competitive and the WING KILL from foamies. In the days of wooden planes, we really had to fly our pants off to get a cut!
H^^