Gosh, Bob, I was hoping you’d suggest a Prowler!
Hi Bill:
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. As far as profiles go, the Prowler is about as good as any of them. As you know they are/were very prevalent at contests on the East Coast.
The actual story behind the designing of the Prowler is interesting.
Scott Smith (who, I am sad to report, passed away recently) came down to my shop in Newton, New Jersey from his home near Albany New York with Steve Buso in the summer of 1988. I had not yet met Scott, but I had heard that he was serious about getting into the modeling business. At that point I was the Editor of
Flying Models magazine, and was in the process of purchasing a new home. Scott had made overtures about purchasing my foam cutting business, and he wanted to have a meeting with me in person to see if that was viable for both of us. As he walked through the door of my shop I held held out my hand to shake with him, and he did the same. But. just before the shake could take place he turned and pointed at a fuselage that was hanging on a pegboard and said these exact words: "I'm going to kit that!" I said, "Well, its nice to meet you too."
The fuselage in question was the one for the first RD-1, the model that my son flew in competition for a while a few years later. The RD-1 was a constant chord wing model that was actually built around a foam version of the Sig Twister wing. It was published in
Flying Models in 1991 as memory serves. It was, and still is a great flying design for training purposes and even for profile and Intermediate competition. I told Scott (with whom I finally got to shake hands...) that a slightly larger, tapered wing version of that model might be more aesthetically pleasing, and he asked me if I would design one for him. He was a very decisive person!
I did design a new profile model around the fuselage shape of the RD-1, and supplied the pencil drawings to Steve Buso - who is a draftsman extroadinaire - and he produced a beautiful set of inked plans to go into the kit, and even named the plane the Prowler. Now, no one had yet built a Prowler... How would it fly? Well, the record shows that it was a great flying little ship, and Scott sold a lot of kits for it through his Aerosmith Aviation company. Many of them were campaigned on the East Coast competition circuit, and also in many places around the country.
The kit is no longer available, but I do still have the plans for it that Steve drew, and would be happy to make copies of them available to anyone who might be interested in building one. I can also make foam wings or foam cores available through Robin's View Productions.
I have often thought about making a full-fuselage version of the Prowler, and with this Covid thing keeping me in the shop all day, every day, I may just draw one up.
And now you know the story behind the Prowler!
Later - Bob Hunt