TeamKennedy-RC.com: Scale Extra Project

Extra 300 (Scale)

One aspect of Model aviation I have always had interest in is scale. I have always tried to add scale touches to my competition aircraft and always appreciate attention to detail. The next chapter in my model avaition life long adventure is a scale project. I visited Top Gun in 2012 and was very impressed with the level of detail that goes into a world class scale project. One thing I noticed is most scale projects are either war birds or some very rare subject like David Wigley's 3 time Top Gun champion Westland Wyvern. I returned from Top Gun confirming scale was the next model aviation adventure I wanted to take. One more reason I think Scale will be great for me now is I can work a couple of hours each evening and on the weekends and if the project takes a year or so that is ok. My work schedule has me traveling a great deal these days making it difficult to get out and practice aerobatics, so scale seemed like a good next chapter for me.

I decided after many hours of thinking of what subject I wanted to build and kept coming back to the Extra 300 aerobatic aircraft. You do not see hardly any aerobatic aircraft as scale subjects and I think the Extra will be a great platform for showing cockpit detail.

I am going with a known tried and true for my basic airframe, Cam McCausey has framed me up a 40% Carden for my base airframe. I am taking delivery of the airframe in January 2013 and have been collecting a lot of documentation. I will be visiting the Extra dealership in Florida in February to document the full scale bird. I have not selected the scheme yet but there is still time. :-)

One of the things I thought about for some time was moving the wing. The base kit (Carden) I started with has the wing positioned at the shoulder. This helps the airplane snap better. For this scale project the wing needs to be moved down. I elected to do this and after many hours of measuring, marking, measuring again and planning how I would add the frame strenght members back to the center box I had a plan.