Alistair

I have had a bit of a shock with building my Balsa USA Eindecker. I have been building it since August and suddenly.......

from out of the blue...............


With no warning...................


Its ready for maiden flight.


Be still my beating heart, I need counselling to cope with the fact apart from a bit of minor paint touchups and lower wing 'wires' I will not have anything to do now.

I feel like Dr Frankenstein, " mein gott, it breathes, das monster lives it is alive"

abufletcher

I'm experiencing a similar shock with my Puppeteer. Nothing left to do but fly it!

phatbob02

My Feedback: (126)

Very nice and you'll love it! Mine is now "my ole faithful". Very relaxing to fly after burning up the sky with war birds.

I enjoyed building mine so much, I started doing a Kadet LT-40 for my dad and it's turning into a Kadeindecker!

jollyroger

My Feedback: (6)

I better get the plans unrolled and hung. I do this to remove the roll from the paper and allows the plans to lie flat. It takes a couple weeks for the plans to loose the roll, but helps when building. I guess it's time to move the kit into the shop and get ready. There is a LHS in the area that carries BUSA kits and supplies which makes it easy to get the needed stuff ie: covering, Ca etc. Would like to use their covering and like the red for that good ol'Fokker red flying circus type warbird. Now for a good pilot bust. Any suggestions?
cheers

Alistair

Yep, had maiden flight today and despite being very blustery she flew lovely just a slight bit of down trim required. I used to have a flair hannibal which I loved as it flew so nice and this is the same but actually looks like a fokker eindecker. Very very pleased with my first build. On now with my next build a 1/4 scale balsa usa Triplane which only requires the undercarriage and little wing between the wheels to be made now.

Alistair

I've flown a puppetteer for my father in law and it was very very nice. You wont be dissappointed.

abufletcher

Congrats on the successful maiden, despite the "blusteriness." The Puppeteer has a reputation as an easy flyer. BTW, here's my EIII which started off life as a BUSA Eindecker kit but quickly turned into a virtual scratch build. Initially, I had very modest goals, primarily to replace the slab sides with a "more scale" built-up structure. Then I decided to do a full flying rudder and a full flying elevator. And once I was on that slippery slope it essentially stopped being a "kit build."

But I've often wished I also had a stock eindecker just for fun.

Dead eyes

My Feedback: (1)

Wow ! Those Fokkers are looking good ! I hope my turns out half as good as those. I will posting some pictures detailing my progress soon. I have completely covered mine and have painted about half of the parts. I scratchbuilt a dummy engine, and have consturcted & wrapped my scale landing gear. I am gonna solder them at work when I get a chance. A friend of mine has been building one too. He was supposed to try it out today, so I had better get on the ball. We plan on flying them next year at Warbird rallies in formation and such.

Dead eyes

My Feedback: (1)

Template I made for the building of the dummy engine. I decided to go with something simple.

Dead eyes

My Feedback: (1)

Photo of the dummy engine after its been primed, sanded, and scaled out. I made the two bottom ones a bit longer & shaped them a bit since the cowl is open on the bottom. The top of the cylinders are not visible anyway so I just cut them straight. With the cowl on it don't look half bad for a first time attempt at a scratch built dummy head.

Dead eyes

My Feedback: (1)

The landing gear wrapped and ready to solder. Being the cheapskate I am, I used some old copper telephone wire that I stripped to wire the landing gear together.

Dead eyes

My Feedback: (1)

Inside the cockpit. I constructed a couple instruments and the yoke. I also trimmed the windshield to look more some pictures I saw.

Dead eyes

My Feedback: (1)

Front view of windshield and machine gun.

Dead eyes

My Feedback: (1)

Picture of the plane with no windshield, control surfaces, cowl without dummy head & rudder taped to the plane to get an idea of how it will look. The landing gear in this picture hasn't been completed either. I have the tail section blocked up as I have not installed the tailskid. ( I am actually debating going with a tailwheel. ) I have flown with a skid before but I like a wheel too.

abufletcher

I can see you went all out on that dummy engine! But the funny thing is, once it's up in the air, going past the pits, no one will be able to tell the difference between this and a flawless replica if they even notice it's there at all.

Alistair

abufletcher you EIII looks absolutely superb! I love the scale detail, may have a go at cutting some solartex strips to try and replicate the fuse woodwork

deadeyes : I have seen people use appropriate diameter vacum cleaner hose as a basis for dummy cylinders. i might try that as mine has a saito 90 flat twin so I might get away with just 2 dummy barrels. Really chuffed that the exhaust gunk only went on the undercarriage and a little bit on the very front of the underside, other than that she was clean as a whistle.

As abu points out in the air people cant see much and I go on the basis that if it looks good 30ft away thats good enough for me. I'd go with the tail skid, ground handling with the big rudder was very good. Wish I'd done a more scale wood skid like abufletcher, but thats life. The trouble is the kit is not particularly scale and once you start adding scale detail - where do you stop? or would it have been better to build from scratch or get a more scale kit. For me I'm quite happy as it looks good in the air but I can appreciate the labour of love on abu's superb EIII

Either way it is a lovely model to fly, very very nice.

abufletcher

I can't truthfully call my EIII a BUSA build, or even a BUSA kit-bash. This was my first ever RC build and I was expecting a "scale model" and was pretty disappointed to discover that the BUSA eindecker is really little more than a gussied up Ugly Stik. Which would have been fine if I had know this. I was a newbie.

Anyway, I built the wing but then decided, after detailed studies of the Joseph Nieto technical drawings that just about everything was "wrong" (if "right" means scale accuracy). The cowl was too long. The wing was in the wrong position. The side "cheek" cowls were the wrong shape and cut at the rear to fit around the wing (vs. the opposite on the original EIII). Plus the cheek cowl on the EIII were actually open at the bottom. The gear was too wide. Neither the rudder of elevator was full-flying. Neither were scale size. You get the picture.

So I set out on what was really a scratch-build based on the Nieto drawings (which I blew up to the scale of the BUSA wing). The reason I kept the wing is that I just didn't know any better and figured that as a brand new RC pilot I needed to ailerons. But since I wanted a full cockpit, I ended up cutting the BUSA wing in half (and removing one of the inboard ribs from each side) and mounting the halves on a brass wing tube. So that's really the only part of the BUSA that I (sort of) used. The rest was entirely scratch built (including a scratch-built custom-shaped brass fuel tank that would fit over the servos that I mounted just behind the firewall).

I'm particularly proud of the scale undercarriage. It has fully functional independently moving legs which are "sprung" on the top (inside the fuse) as on the original. Very few EIII models get this full treatment. In addition, the legs have the wooden fairings that were apparently used on at least some (and possibly most) EIIIs.

The cowl is an aluminum cooking pot with the random swirl done with an electric eraser (German aircraft didn't use the engine turning seen on some British aircraft and the majority of Eindecker models). The dummy engine is a heavily modified Williams Bros LeRhone kit. This was modified both to enlarge the scale and to make it look more like the Gnome/Uberursel engine used on the EIII.

I suppose what I should really have bought was the Aerodrome EIII kit. It about the same size and mostly scale. Ah well...live and learn.

But as I've always said the BUSA Eindecker builds into a fine model that good for loads of fun at the field. It's just not an EIII. But that's ok; not everyone's into scale.

Dead eyes

My Feedback: (1)

Looks great ! If I build another one maybe I will put those mods in as well. Thanks for all the post guys.

Dead eyes

My Feedback: (1)

I decided to hand paint the plane ID number & Jasta number. I made a template for the crosses and traced them lightly with a pencil, then highlighted them with black paint. I'm trying to go for the used battlefront look, lol, Later on I will fill in the crosses and fuel proof it with clearcoat.

Dead eyes

My Feedback: (1)

Dummy engine with cowl on & landing gear soldered.

Alistair

Looking good ! I've hand painted lettering on mine and crosses etc and it looks more realistic being not perfect (I think)

abufletcher

I don't like the look of airbrushed WWI models; it just looks too slick. Hand-painting is better and for the really small stuff custom decals. This doesn't mean that WWI markings looked "sloppy" in any sense. It's perfectly possible to do a very neat job of hand-painting and the workers who did this back in WWI were often quite skilled at it. I hand-painted all the markings on my EIII except for the numbering.

Here are the hand-painted (no masks) roundels on my Sopwith Snipe and I think you'll agree that they look plenty "professional."

abufletcher

You know, the ironic thing about that red stripe on the thousands and thousands of BUSA eindeckers out there (as well a SR Eindeckers) is that WWI aviation historians strongly suspect that it was actually blue ("Bavarian Blue") as this was "regional color," so to speak, of Max Immelmann, the pilot of this particular EIII.

Dead eyes

My Feedback: (1)

Yeah, I have read that. Where did you get that pilot ? My daughter wants Snoopy to fly again but I want a more scale pilot. I may let Snoopy fly the Maiden flight and then switch out.

Dead eyes

My Feedback: (1)

I wasn't totaly happy with my Dummy engine so I decided to add a little more. I started by adding black electrical wire conduct cover to the cylinders. It is spilt and stretched it over the plywood cylinders. I then drilled and added wire to add more detail. I also cut the bottom from a 12 .oz aluminum can to simulate the center section. I sanded the paint from it an cut a hole in the bottom so the shaft of my real .91 O.S FS can stuck through.