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63% Replica F6F Hellcat Build

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ScaleBirdsScott

Well-Known Member
Joined
Feb 10, 2015
Messages
1,745
Location
Uncasville, CT
So after having mentioned this project a few times, I thought it was high time to give it a discussion thread of its own.

I'm an industrial designer, and part of a small group of guys designing and building a warbird replica, an F6F Hellcat scaled down to 5/8 size.

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An admittedly old render of a CAD variation of the Hellcat. Almost everything from that version has been remodeled, but the information was useful.

For now it's a project to make a prototype aircraft, but there's no use or sense hiding that we are aiming to turn the design into a kitplane type venture, if and when that is viable.

The overall goal, in short, is to create a core frame design and a number of common parts and use those with some custom fuselage skins and other details to build up a small library of replica designs that can be built with minimal work between them. So far the successful kitplane replicas in the WWII world are of the popular P51 and Spitfire, and if you're going to spend years developing an airplane hoping it will sell for a period it only makes sense to target the most popular replicas you can. But we wanted to open up the market to a host of the other, equally important, but perhaps less univerally known, designs. Robert Baslee and his Airdrome WWI replicas use a similar concept of keeping the method and parts mostly the same and just tweaking the shapes; which is why he can offer dozens of aircraft models. We'll look to see what designs we can justify after the Hellcat, but for now the F6F is our priority.

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We have a final design coming together, though some things, like the Flaps and cockpit, are not final. In this image, the skins and bulkheads are hidden, to show the frame.

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We recently finished the metal work on our Elevators. They'll be fabric covered; the extra work was worth the weight savings.

The project was originally an effort of mine to expand on an idea of my father's, but has certainly changed greatly in scope since then. The core of the idea is still intact, but we've spent a lot of time exploring the options and alternatives to arrive on our current path. Not to say it's perfect, and i'm posting here as much to gain some critique and jumpstart some hopefully helpful discussion as I am to just raise awareness of what we're doing.

I can't speak so much for the engineering side. I understand just as much as I need to in order to design structures, make the shapes in the computer, and then turn them into parts that we can build. I also knew enough to know that I absolutely was not up for the maths involved. We have gotten help from a small number of engineers over the project course so far to help us develop the idea, calculate the aerodynamics, choose airfoils, and much more. I'll encourage them to add their voice to the discussion and perhaps we can all learn and learn alike.

I recently setup a website, ScaleBirds, using Squarespace. It is still quite new, and much work is yet to do as I learn the format and gather more content. But I think it does cover some of the bases for now and will be growing rapidly.

I guess that's it for now, getting late, but I thought it would be good to put this out for you all to see.
 
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