Will Aldridge
Well-Known Member
Designing and building my own plane has been a goal for quite awhile. My first love is the Corsair so I had to have that inverted gull wing(yes I know that's going to complicate things). But as much as I like the Corsair there was at least one major deficiency in the design, which was the way the fuselage tapered before the maximum thickness of the wing which caused a lot of drag. I am big fan Mike Arnold and his AR-5 and studied a lot of the things he has done in his AR-5 and AR-6, which means I don't have the fuselage start tapering until shortly before it reaches the trailing edge and then I added the expanded radius fillets.
Also i wanted a plane that was uniquely my own. So being a fan of WWII fighters I decided to mix a few features of 2 of the other great fighters from that era namely the Spitfire and Mustang. As you can see from the attached 3-view I am using semi-elliptical wing and horizontal tail plan form. I am going to accomplish this using hotwired foam core in sections. The Mustang DNA is seen in the vertical tail. The Spitfires elliptical vertical tail may be more efficient but I never did like the look so I decided to add some Mustang to the mix.
So that's the philosophy behind the asthetics of the design.
Originally I was planning on building it out of aluminum but that extremely complex wing geometry would have been too difficult so I'm going with composites.
As currently drawn (still tweaking and analysing and learning) it has a 21.5 ft wingspan with 75 sq ft of wing and the fuselage is about 18 ft long. I'm using the NACA 65-415 airfoil for a couple of reasons. First off it allows a fairly deep spar, and second it has a high CL max and benign stall characteristics.
Horsepower will be in the 85-115 range with gross weight hopefully about 850lbs. If I had all the money I wanted I would use the Rotamax 120hp engine, but economics will probably force the use of a VW or a Corvair conversion.
The fuselage is 25" wide, 24" inside the cockpit, and designed to accommodate my 6'1" tall frame comfortably. I plan on using vacuum infusion. I can make the fuselage in 3 pieces (I think) by making fairly simple molds.
The one other feature of the design worth mentioning is the retractable gear. In order to use a simple mechanism to get it to fully retract I am going to mount the pivot on an angle so I don't have to have it rotate in 2 axis'.
I would like to build the wing in 1 piece that could be removed from the fuselage but given the inverted gull wing it might be easier to have the outer panels bolt to the center section.
Comments welcome.
Also i wanted a plane that was uniquely my own. So being a fan of WWII fighters I decided to mix a few features of 2 of the other great fighters from that era namely the Spitfire and Mustang. As you can see from the attached 3-view I am using semi-elliptical wing and horizontal tail plan form. I am going to accomplish this using hotwired foam core in sections. The Mustang DNA is seen in the vertical tail. The Spitfires elliptical vertical tail may be more efficient but I never did like the look so I decided to add some Mustang to the mix.
So that's the philosophy behind the asthetics of the design.
Originally I was planning on building it out of aluminum but that extremely complex wing geometry would have been too difficult so I'm going with composites.
As currently drawn (still tweaking and analysing and learning) it has a 21.5 ft wingspan with 75 sq ft of wing and the fuselage is about 18 ft long. I'm using the NACA 65-415 airfoil for a couple of reasons. First off it allows a fairly deep spar, and second it has a high CL max and benign stall characteristics.
Horsepower will be in the 85-115 range with gross weight hopefully about 850lbs. If I had all the money I wanted I would use the Rotamax 120hp engine, but economics will probably force the use of a VW or a Corvair conversion.
The fuselage is 25" wide, 24" inside the cockpit, and designed to accommodate my 6'1" tall frame comfortably. I plan on using vacuum infusion. I can make the fuselage in 3 pieces (I think) by making fairly simple molds.
The one other feature of the design worth mentioning is the retractable gear. In order to use a simple mechanism to get it to fully retract I am going to mount the pivot on an angle so I don't have to have it rotate in 2 axis'.
I would like to build the wing in 1 piece that could be removed from the fuselage but given the inverted gull wing it might be easier to have the outer panels bolt to the center section.
Comments welcome.
