I'm pleased to be able to present the plan for my 39" span King Air, in case any of you fancy giving it a go. It's a model with a lot of potential I think - so far
the best I've done is 50 seconds, but I'm sure she'll break a minute. The model seems nice and stable, despite the low wing layout, and you
can swing decent sized (9 inch) props. It's also a 35 bonus point model for FAC competition, where it qualifies for the "Jumbo Scale" class.
The plan is on three A1 sheets, and patterns for a jig are included for assembling the engine nacelle sides - this would be tricky directly on the building
board because there they are not flat on the top or bottom.
Here is the jig in action. The base pieces of the jig are glued between the two vertical formers to keep everything square when
viewed from the top.
The base of the jig can be pinned to the building board to keep it flat.
The nacelle uprights are simply taped to the card formers to pull the frames to their desired postion before
inserting the 1/16" sq. cross pieces. When the glue is dry, carefully remove the tape, and slide out the assembly.
Here is a close-up of the wing tongue and box. Note how the root rib has been filled in with sheet
and a piece of paper glued to the top of the tongue to give a tight fit (you may not need this if you build your box tighter than I did).
At this stage the locating peg at the trailing edge has not yet been added.
Here are the wing sections mated together.
The centre section is covered before adding the nacelle frames. Note the nacelles are handed, so they appear vertical when the
wing is viewed from the front. You can also see than the leading edge and turbulator spars
have been cut away where the nacelles sit. This is to give more clearance for the rubber motor.
One other thing you might be able to see on this photo is that to get the required curve in plan view of the front sheeted bay of the frames,
I ended up filing two vertical grooves inside the frames, and bent them carefully so they just started to crack. A brush of cyano into the grooves
locked the wood in position.
Here is an upper view of the nacelle with the formers and most of the stringers added.
Try to make a neat job of the area where the stringers meet the wing sheeting by adding scraps of soft balsa between them before covering the nacelles.
Here is some detail on the rear lower part of the nacelle showing the rubber anchorages.
In the event, I used the forward peg, which had more clearance for the rear bobbin on the motor,
so deleted the rear peg position from the drawing.
This photo shows the shaping needed at the front of the nacelles after the laminations of 1/8" balsa have been added.
Here is a bones shot of the almost complete airframe. Note the wing centre section is covered, then fitted to the
fuselage before adding the lower stringers.
And another shot of the finished model, which reveals a stupid mistake I made - I missed the fact that there is an extra window
on the starboard side opposite the entry door. This is shown on the plan, so you can get this feature correct! I hope there are
no FAC judges reading this page.....
There are a huge number of colourful schemes for the King Air - Airliners.net is a good resource.
If you are thinking of doing an electric version, either free flight or R/C, remember I moved the engine nacelles out by half an inch
to give me more prop clearance. The smaller props used on an electric model render this unnecessary, so you could take out the
extra half inch from the
inner wing panels if you were feeling keen. For an R/C model you could also reduce the dihedral a bit.
Thanks to Monique Lyons for filming the flight below at the Oxford Model Flying Club's "Scale Fest 2016" meeting - this was the first time the
model broke the magic minute mark.
The three plan sheets are A1 size, and can be tiled to suit the paper in your printer using Acrobat reader.
Click
here to download plan sheet 1 as a pdf (339 KB)
Click
here to download plan sheet 2 as a pdf (188 KB)
Click
here to download plan sheet 3 as a pdf (427 KB)
If I've missed something or you find anything unclear on the plans, please get in touch - also if you want any help or advice should you
tackle the model, just drop me an email.
To read and print the pdf files you need Adobe Acrobat Reader, which
is a free download from www.adobe.com Make sure you have version X or higher to obtain the tile printing facility.