Young boy building a balsa plane circa 1940. A lot of us got our start with RC planes this way.
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View Reddit by blade944 – View Source
Young boy building a balsa plane circa 1940. A lot of us got our start with RC planes this way.
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View Reddit by blade944 – View Source
Balsa wood planes were great fun, especially the ones with the rubber band propellers!!
Wow, that’s a complicated looking project for such a young person – must’ve had some adult help. If not he certainly grew up to design jet fighters. Stealth bombers, maybe.
And the smell of model airplane glue …
No youtube instruction for that guy.
I did plastic models. The smell of Testor’s cement and after a while, sort of a light headed dreamy feel, hmmm?
That’s dope!
I got my start in aerospace engineering from rubber-powered model airplanes. Started with kits, then designed my own, then started flying (manned) gliders, then got my engineering degree. These are kinda what started it all!
That’s how they made real ones not long previous
I still build with balsa. Currently have a .40 size A-10 warthog I’m designing and building from scratch that’ll be EDF.
https://preview.redd.it/vwvh2e7mns3c1.jpeg?width=816&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ec10d6f0176363438ee9917c41f865bf2309edeb
There aren’t many young people who do things like this anymore, it’s a shame. I’m a big fan of the Guillows models. The laser cuts are especially nice. The old models were either Die cut or printed on and you had to cut out all the pieces by hand. Talk about commitment! 😅
It seems like the level of technical knowledge involved in kids’ hobbies has dropped dramatically. Most kids today wouldn’t have the attention span to put something like this together.
My father would build these and then later became a pilot
When I was a kid in the 60s my 4 older cousins had model airplanes like this, which they had made in the late 50s. They had the balsa wood, fabric, “dope” to shrink and stiffen it, tons of paints and all kinds of tools. Also a collection of lit-up beer signs on their walls – some with bubbling liquid inside – and even a ham radio. Their room was a 50s nerd paradise that I loved to explore when we visited every couple months. They were the big brothers I never had, and I wish I’d been able to spend more time around them.
I built a number of these in the early 70’s when I was about age 11 to 13. The Guillows kits looked really nice, but all I could afford were Comet kits which were $1 for the small planes (25” wingspan) to $3 for the large ones (54” wingspan on an Aeronca, which seemed giant). The best flying plane I built was a Comet P-38 Lightning which had a 34” wingspan as I recall. I had one Cox .049 engine that I robbed from my brothers control line plane, so I mounted it on the center cockpit pod, took it out in the cornfield and launched it. That plane kept climbing in a straight line until it was almost out of sight, then the engine quit and it glided down safely. Those were fun times as a kid.
Welp. It’s official. 7 year olds in 1940 are definitely smarter than me at age 40 in 2023
I suggest checking out the YouTube channel Maxfliart for some really good free flight videos
There are kids with engineering degrees that couldn’t build this now. Their talents end with Autodesk or some other design software. My daughter’s ex had a master’s in industrial engineering, and I swear he never even used a screwdriver. No real-world hands-on experience.
Kiel Kraft kits!
Getting high in life and model glue