Monthly Archives: July 2015

Comic-Con 2015

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Geek Power! (raises fist to the sky with glowing ring on finger followed by numerous lightning flashes)

Though RC is my passion, as the name on this blog indicates, I’m also a geek (I know, shocking, right?!).  Though I’m not a big reader of comic books or graphic novels (I generally read for research), I love many of the comic book characters and thoroughly enjoy the many movies and TV shows that are out.  I’ve researched origin stories and evaluated similarities of film stories to comic book stories and all that nonsense (cue Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds as he declares, “NERD!!”).  So, you can understand my excitement when this year, I had the opportunity to go to one of San Diego’s institutions…Comic-Con!  If you know anything about how tickets are acquired for Comic-Con, being an average Joe like me, tickets seem almost impossible to obtain.  Somehow this year, we made it through and with much excitement by myself (and the rest of my family), we got tickets!

comic-con hulk buster

It was an early, cloud covered Sunday morning of getting to the Trolley station (no way were we going to drive down there!) and picking up our tickets.  We arrived an hour before the doors opened and there were already droves of people flowing towards the convention center.  Surprisingly though, getting our tickets was Continue reading →

How to Build an RC Jet – Part 8

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Raised Rivets made easy

I had originally intended for our last article and this one to be a single write-up.  However, as I continued to write more and more on the construction, I realized that the article really needed to be split into two.  Also, since detailing and the application of raised rivets is extensible to more than just speed brakes, I figured a single article on this process would be good since it is a process that can be applied to aircraft as a whole.  As with the last article, I’ve also included a how-to video to help illustrate the process which is at the end of the article.

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Let’s Get Things Ready

buld-an-rc-jet---skyray-88Last time we built our speed brake assemblies to where we had 4 fully functional speed brakes that could be installed into the airframe.  However, detailing the internals is quite a bit simpler with the speed brakes outside of the airframe and broken down into their components.  The first item of business was to finish the inside speed brake by adding the sheet metal close out surface on the inside.  This was cut from 1/64″ ply and glued onto the basswood stiffeners that create our hinge mentioned previously.  Continue reading →

How to Build an RC Jet – Part 7

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All I wanted was to install bulkheads…but somehow ended up with 4 speed brakes instead…

We have a pretty sizable article this week which is the first in a two part series discussing how the speed brakes were built, actuated and detailed for our Frankel F4D Skyray.  In addition, I’ve put together a couple how-to videos to support (the first being below).  So, let’s get to it!

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Fuselage ready for surgery.

In our previous article, we completed (mostly) our dorsal assembly.  With that completed, we can finally move on to work on the fuselage.  Typically I would go to the wings next (I generally like to work on the largest parts last), but in the case of this build, we need to have bulkheads installed in the fuselage first before working on the wings.  This is so that the wing mounts and spars can be setup in the foam cores before they are sheeted.

So, this originally was going to be a quick task; cutting hatches, installing bulkheads, that’s quick right?!…  Continue reading →