RC Plane

I made an RC plane as my instructables project. When I was thinking about what I wanted to do I wanted to do something that no one else was doing in my classroom at the time. I wanted to challenge my self and wanted to do something that I have never done before. The RC plane will be completely made out of foam. The wings will have a total length of 88 cm and the fuselage's (body) length is 57 cm.

• Foam (the width of the foam board you get should be 3mm)
• servo's (it is what makes the stabaaizers which will help it move left, right, up, and down
• DC 180 brushed motor (the engine of the plane)
• tape
• hot glue gun
• box cutter
• 1mm steel rod
• 3.7V battery
• plastic propeller
• micro receiver
• controller to control the plane
• 20 A ESC
• balsa wood

When all the materials got to my house I thought that it would be best to first build the main body, wings, and stabilizers that were all made out of foam. I started with the body of the plane which is a long, thin piece of foam that was 53 cm long. I had too make two pieces of the body since just one piece would be to thin so I made another then hot glued them together. The hardest part of making making the foam pieces was definitely the wings with the foam being not that bendable so I could make it into a more aerodynamic shape. What I first did to figure out this problem was I started snapping the foam, not in half but snapping it so that it is more flexible. When I had my two wing pieces finished I then started cutting out pieces of balsa wood that will be the shape of the plane. I have to make a lot of pieces since the whole length of the wing is 88cm and the balsa wood pieces are very small. When I have cut out all the pieces I hot glue them to the wing and bend the wing onto the balsa wood pieces to get the shape.

This would be the hardest part of building and RC anything if you are a beginner to building things like an RC plane. Like me I am a beginner and this was very hard for me to do. I started with the servos which help the vertical stabilizers and horizontal stabilizers. To connect both stabilizers to the servos I used a 1mm metal rod which I had to bend to get them to connect. To get the motor running I had to solder wires onto the motor so I could connect to the ESC. There needed to be a 3.7v battery for the main power source as if you have a battery but it does not have wires already connected to it you will either need to buy one or solder one onto there. The ESC (also known as an electronic speed control)is an electronic speed control is an electronic circuit that controls and regulates the speed of an electric motor. It may also provide reversing of the motor and dynamic braking. Miniature electronic speed controls are used in electrically powered radio controlled models. To make everything move you need to connect all the wires to the micro receiver. There are different types of receivers you can use but it does not really matter which one you use as long as you can connect it to your controller you are using to fly the plane. There are usually multiple channels on the receiver and they might be different as you might need to find out what wires need to go to what channel. Finally to make the whole plane move is the controller. I would say the best beginner controller would be the FS-I6X which is a really easy setup to get your RC plane started.

Overall this is the hardest thing I have ever built as it took a lot of time and learning to build this. The reason it might have taken such a long time is because that I was new going into this project and had to do a lot of research. I would recommend doing research about parts and how to build an RC plane before you really start getting material's and building. This project is really fun to build and you can learn a lot form building something like this as it has electronics and hands on building.