Balsa wood Airplane models

[Tony Wilkins]

I've had a closet full of these and recently got one out to build with the long break away from my shop staying with family. Does anyone else here do these as a hobby?

I've also been watching to see if the things I've learned in hand tool woodworking carries over to the other hobby involving wood. Any ideas?

[Lee Reep]

I did RC planes for awhile, but what I built didn't need much beyond gluing up pieces, and covering with fabric. The closer to woodworking for me is model rocketry, where I do (seems like mostly "did" is the operative word) a lot of custom fabrication. For really sharp leading and trailing edges on fins, I used a tiny plane to shave them, then used CA to toughen the fragile balsa.

A friend of mine went to an RC club auction a few years ago, and bought a number of wooden RC planes that were fully built from balsa, but not covered. He paid about $5 for the lot. I think the builders enjoyed the building process, and not finishing, or even flying, as much, if at all. He gave them to me a few years ago. This summer I burned one in our fire pit. Wow, balsa and Ambroid glue burn crazy hot! The last one I'll likely use as kindling in our fireplace this winter. Gives a new meaning to the phrase "crash and burn" ...

[george wilson]

Seems like a sad thing to do with models someone put effort into.

[Russell Sansom]

I made scores of them as a child many decades ago. In modern life I played quite a bit with what are called "hand launched gliders," a genuine class of model plane. These are "always" made in solid balsa for the simple reason that built-up wings can't take the thrust demanded by a launch. As an aside, a competitive max time for a hand-launched glider is ( used to be, anyway ) 5 minutes. It might be hard to relate to, but seeing a little 12 - 15" wing span glider flung into the sky, leveling out, and circling at a snail's pace is one of the most amazing sights in the flying world. My longest flight was 2 minutes and that was a tremendous achievement, so it's not a child's pursuit, exactly.
But to the subject, I found my high-precision hand working skills very helpful in making flight surfaces symmetrical and in forming the perfect dihedral among wing-fuselage(a fine stick, basically )-wing. I found it helpful to build two or three "identical" gliders at a time and grown-up skills came in handy there as well.
Finally, in building up the occasional bulkhead/stringers model over the last years, it has been instructive to compare myself now to myself as a naive 8 or 10 or 12 year-old. I have a much better idea of what works now and what doesn't. I tend now to let the joinery do the work rather than hoping Duco Cement would do it for me. And one more comment, I soured on modern wooden gliders. Those laser-cut 2-meter wings parts are a tremendous improvement over the kits of my childhood, but most of these modern kits rely on the use of CA glues. The fumes from these glues make me very sick in a hurry and I always worry for the health of my pretty little Senegal Parrot. Even a working cabinet with a fan to the outside wasn't enough to take the fumes out of the house, so I finally gave up on them.

Sorry, a bit of a lengthy brain dump, but I guess it's still a fascinating subject for the child in me.

Cheers,
Russ