WurlyBird
Well-Known Member
If you are familiar with RC planes at all you know that one of the big categories is Pusher Jets. I am wondering if a similar setup would work for a home build airplane. A scale jet fuselage powered by a pusher prop, this configuration could lead to a lot of really cool home builts. So I have two questions;
1. Has anyone ever seen/designed/built/completely negated the idea of a full scale "pusher jet"? Imagine a BD-5 with an F-15 body on it. Modern jets have pretty large wings as well which would lend themselves to being scaled down nicely.
2. While I was thinking of this idea I realized that it would be easiest if the engine was mounted in or on the fuse, closer to the actual CoG then all the way at the tail. For balancing purposes. So of course a set up like the BD-5 again comes to mind. I understand that this airframe has had it's share of issues. Was the engine location one of them or have people figured out how to run all the hardware pretty reliably? I have seen a few pictures where the engine was linked to a drive shaft with Thomas couplings, similar to a helicopter tail rotor drive shaft. Is this the preferred method and does it work? How far could you reliably mount an engine from the prop? I know the Stemme ST-10 has a centrally mounted engine with the prop out front, and it even has a prop cowl that retracts over the retracted prop (it's a motor glider) so it obviously has a rigid shaft going through the rotating shaft. There are a lot of cool ideas that could come from this.
Other concerns include prop clearance and cooling but those are questions for later.
1. Has anyone ever seen/designed/built/completely negated the idea of a full scale "pusher jet"? Imagine a BD-5 with an F-15 body on it. Modern jets have pretty large wings as well which would lend themselves to being scaled down nicely.
2. While I was thinking of this idea I realized that it would be easiest if the engine was mounted in or on the fuse, closer to the actual CoG then all the way at the tail. For balancing purposes. So of course a set up like the BD-5 again comes to mind. I understand that this airframe has had it's share of issues. Was the engine location one of them or have people figured out how to run all the hardware pretty reliably? I have seen a few pictures where the engine was linked to a drive shaft with Thomas couplings, similar to a helicopter tail rotor drive shaft. Is this the preferred method and does it work? How far could you reliably mount an engine from the prop? I know the Stemme ST-10 has a centrally mounted engine with the prop out front, and it even has a prop cowl that retracts over the retracted prop (it's a motor glider) so it obviously has a rigid shaft going through the rotating shaft. There are a lot of cool ideas that could come from this.
Other concerns include prop clearance and cooling but those are questions for later.
