grampi50

Retired now, I'm looking for something to occupy my time. 30 years ago I flew giant scale RCs. A friend of mine and I made our own planes from hardware and materials we bought from Menard's...in fact, we named the planes Menard's Specials. The wings were hot-wire-cut pink Styrofoam sheets. The front of the fuse was 4" PVC pipe that the wing was also mounted on, it also housed all radio gear, flight battery, and fuel tank. A 1' aluminum channel was used to adjoin the tail surfaces to the PVC pipe. This plane had an 84" wingspan and was powered by a Sachs Dolmar 3.2 (52.5cc) A&M engine. Tail section was all balsa. These planes were nothing to look at, but they were inexpensive to produce, and they flew great

Browsing through ebay today I came across someone selling one of these Sachs engines for not much money. I contacted the seller and he said the engine had only run a couple of times on the bench and has never been installed on a plane. It's not even broken in yet. So I bought it. Next I start looking for planes that are large enough to handle this size engine. I am not having any luck at finding 1) an ARF big enough to handle this engine and 2) finding the type of planes that are NOT scale to some real plane, in other words, something that would look more the Menard's Special, and 3) finding vendors that have ANYTHING in stock. Doing some searching I see Great Planes USED to make a Big Stick XL in an ARF that had a 96" wingspan, but it has been discontinued. Byron Originals made a giant scale ARF that was called the Pipe Dream. Byron went under decades ago, but a company called Iron Bay took over producing the Byron kits, even the Pipe Dream, but I read that they have also gone under. However, their website is still active and they still have planes listed there, but no phone number listed, and only an email address. If they're still in business I could order the Pipe Dream, but if not, I'm dead in the water. There are plenty of giant scale war birds available, if I wanted to spend $$$thousands$$$ on a plane, which I don't. I would rather spend the extra money to get an ARF kit as opposed to making my own planes, but if I can't find any, then I might have to go back to making Menard's Special. Also, what's up with the vendors being so out of stock on everything? It seems like everything I look up that's RC related is out of stock...this may put the kibosh on my plan of getting back in all together...

OldBill

So many things have changed over the years.
you should go ahead and build another Menard’s Special.
I have gathered materials and hardware for a Ziroli Stearman.

grampi50

It's already in the works!

ahicks

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Texas RC has been around a while, has some ARF's, among them this 50cc Stick
https://www.texasrcplanes.com/drastik50cc.html