These are a couple of R/C model planes I built awhile back from scratch.
The first is a replica of my first ever R/C model built in 1964, a Sterling Mambo. The original was balsa and silk and powered by an O.S .19. At the time, since it would be my first flight ever, a fellow club member took it up for me, then handed me the transmitter (it was a single channel Citizenship with a Galloping Ghost switcher added-on). I totaled it after flying for less than a minute. I had taken me month to build it. I didn't build models again for 44 years.
The new Mambo fuselage was built from pink owens corning fanfold foam and covered with paper. The wing was solid wire-cut foam, also covered in paper. It flew nicely, and was a real soaring machine. It could thermal.
The "engine" in front was fake. It was just an aluminum casting sprue turned with fins to look the part. The actual power was a small electric outrunner, beneath. I hit on te idea for the faux engine because I'd built the plane so lightly that it needed nose ballast to balance. The chunk of aluminum at the very tip was just right.
The other plane was an original design for a Brown B-2 "Miss Los Angeles", carved out of solid foam. Also covered in paper. It was modeled after one of the Golden Age pylon racers. The Brown was a handful to fly, but exciting. Especially the first test flight, where I struggled to get it up high enough to be able to reach for the trim levers after an iffy hand launch with the model badly out of trim. I did manage to keep it away from terra firma and get it straightened out. But you definitely had to fly that plane, not like the Mambo, which if you throttled down would basically act like a big free-flighter, and you could set your transmitter down on the ground.
