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I’ve been pondering designing my own RC plane for a while, not completely from scratch mind, but a scale job. Sports-scale probably better defines my intentions, I’ve neither the time nor patience to spend hundreds of hours on reproducing a scale model in minute detail. There have been a couple of free plans in the mags recently (Tims Airspeed Courier springs to mind) of about 60" span with electric power, which have got me thinking.

Over the Christmas period I took my son to the RAF Museum at Hendon, while wandering around one of the halls a little aircraft from the thirties caught my eye, a Miles M.12 Mohawk. I thought this was a pretty little plane, looking nice in the orange and black colour scheme. Looking it over for a while I started to think this might make a nice scaleĀ candidate. There was nothing too awkward about the shape, nice tapered (but not too sharply) wings, a reasonable length nose. Hmm, maybe this would be the one chose.

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On returning home I did some digging and found a bit more information on Wikipedia, and a little 3 view here (Broken link ~~http://home.comcast.net/~aero51/html/gallery/m12.htm~~). That’ll do to get me started, I also wanted to practice using CAD, so it was decided then. First step I wanted to do was trace the 3 view into CAD, from there I could scale it to whatever size felt appropriate and then start to work on the internal structure.

The specs of the original are as follows:

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  25.5 feet
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  35 feet
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  183 sq feet
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Having done a bit of maths, 1/8 scale would give me a span of 53 inches with a wing area of 412 sq. inches. That feels about right for the same power plant that Timused in the Courier. 1/7 scale gives 58 inch span with an area of 508 sq inches, I might end up going for that, I want to chat to some people first, to see what they think.

So anyway, to cut a long story short, in a few spare moments over the last week, I’ve traced the 3 view. Its pretty complete, a few of the curves need a little work if you zoom right in, which I’ll try and tidy up to the point I’m completely happy with. There is a png of the cad file below if you are interested.

You can click on any of the images on this page bigger versions, if you want the full size of the 3 view below, click here.

Ā Thats all for now, I want to do a little tidying up and then start thinking about the internal structure.