You have no idea how strong that plane is. I had a situation where, when the pushrod broke, I drilled mine straight in on asphalt and, sheared the motor mount bolts, drove the motor right through the firewall, bent the crankshhaft and in general obliterated everything from the lead edge forward. Everything aft of the lead edge was unharmed.
Forget light - that plane flies much better when in the low 40s.
Here's something I posted a while back:
“I bought a Brodak Nobler kit a few years back (around 1998) and built it pretty much to print. The kit was one of the best quality I’ve ever seen – every part was exactly as it should be. I set up the control ratios and CG exactly as called out on the plan and it weighed 34 ounces with a Fox .35 and a decent finish. When I described it to George (Aldrich) he said it would fly like a pig!
Taken back a bit, I asked him to elaborate. He said that the main problem was that it was too light: It will not groove, will jump on any square pullouts and will balloon and bounce on landing.
Figuring “what does he know?” (Actually we had become pretty good friends by that time), I decided that it would be fine as built so I took it out to have some fun.
It would not groove, jumped in pullouts, and ballooned and bounced on landings! I tried narrowing the handle line spacing, adding a bit of nose weight and playing with outboard weight. NOTHING worked. I flew exactly as George said it would. I let a local expert flyer try it and he could not make it perform. While preparing to take it to a swap meet with a $5.00 price tag on it, I mentioned the issue to someone else and he just said, “it’s too light – period. It will never fly properly”. I also read that some people had reduced the amount of flap movement and the plane improved. My original Green-Box Nobler was quite nose-heavy so I decided that if I was going to add weight, why not put some in the nose.
So, here’s what I wound up doing: I shortened the nose by about 1/2 inch, reduced the flap movement to about 75% of the elevator movement, put on a somewhat heavy aluminum spinner, an APC prop, a larger tank and a Fox muffler. I added tail weight until it balanced about ½” forward of the suggested point. All that and removing all the tip weight did the trick. Total weight came up to around 43 ounces I can now say that the Fox .35 powered Brodak Nobler with the small modifications I performed has turned out to be one of the best flying stunt planes I’ve ever owned.
Bob Z.”
Topic: Brodak Nobler (Read 5944 times)