Saving what I can from the Thunderbird.

According to the rules if you build one of the major components, wing or fuselage, you can claim to be the builder of the model. This plane was designed and built by a prominent modeler. I got it third hand after it was crashed. The nose was gone back to the fuel tank compartment. I managed to get an engine on and fly it a few times. It flew well. I hung it up while I struggled to figure out what to do with it. After scratch building the Twister it struck me that I could salvage the wing and tail then build a profile fuselage for the pieces. I have the drawings and traced the profile shape and moved things around a bit, because, that's why. I'm keeping the push rods so the "numbers" will be the same. I planned to remove the old covering and monokote things but the paint is real tough to remove so I'll keep the wing as original. The flaps didn't move up and down equally so I cut that rod and spliced in a tube to even out the throws. The wing is a foam core and had a lot of foam pieces inside making noise and could get caught in the bell crank so I spent an hour shaking and picking pieces out. The original fuselage was about 3 inches wide and the wing has that much bare wood. I'll have to lay a strip of fiberglass around it to cover that up and hide the gouges I made removing the fuselage sides. The elevator doesn't move all that much either but it did fly well. I'm going to do something to get more movement out of it but I don't know what yet as it's hinged. I did make the motor mounts out of 3/8 x 1/2 aluminum channel. The photo shows the plywood and balsa that fills the channel. I should have did that on the Twister.
   I flew the Twister with the OS .25 this morning and it went well. I put 60 foot lines for it in the box for the next session.