Guillows 900 series Typhoon

[scigs30]

I am almost done with the Beaver but put it aside to work on the this build so I could hopefully enter Howard's Guillows challenge. I wasn't going to enter this time because I told myself I would not build another Guillows kit that is not Laser cut. This kit was pretty bad as far as the quality of wood and die crushing. I really believe these are going to be great kits once Guillows lose the 1/20 sheet and go to quality laser cut 1/16 sheet balsa. I decided to enter because I feel I owe it to Howard since he works so hard to put these challenges together, thank you for your hard work Howard. I really encourage everyone to enter one of these contest to show our support for Guillows. As with most Guillows kits I built this straight out of the box with the only modifications is a removable nose and 6 inch Guillows Prop instead of the short 5 inch prop supplied in the kit. The landing gear is removable and will not be added to the final build. I will be using Guillows tissue and will get her up and flying this next week. The challenge ends this month.

[Steve Blanchard]

Hey Scigs, great choice on the Typhoon. By far one of the best flyers in that series. The only thing I did with mine was a slightly larger stab. Flew pretty much right off the board. I've seen them win flying Aces mass launch events if trimmed right. Good luck!

Steve

[joecrouse]

I think there are some mods to consider when building this thing,

I Beefed up the wing and wing roots especially where the wing sections join. I used some thicker scrap to keep the angles nice true, (2 points of contact instead of 1.) and to give a lot more surface for glue (again better glue joint), I found that it helps a lot in terms of keeping the wing straight when covering, Instead of the 1/8th inch nose backers if you got a couple of scraps of 1/8th by 1/8th squares ( I Scavenged from the scrap of one of the 400 series I psychoticly keep ALL the good sized scrap from all planes because... I have issues as my ex wife says) That gives it some more strength. Even with my mod of the backers nose weight wasn't a big deal due to the shape. (I still had to use two brass washers behind the nose spinner I sanded one down with a bastard file to give it a tiny bit of side thrust.) I also rebuilt the tail and stabilizers with regular 1/6th balsa and sanded them a bit to thin em out, making the frame thinner saving tail weight. I put 100/200 winds on it and it got about 20 seconds. The neighborhood kids kinda destroyed it after that.

Just my thoughts.

[twospruces]

What makes the 900 series better flyers than the 500 series?

[joecrouse]

weight mainly.

If you could take the 500 series and put them all in 1/20th thin balsa and trimmed them all to be as light as possible you could get the 500s to fly as good as the 900 series.

[Supercubber95]

Beautiful job scigs. Now let's see it with the wrapper on!

[scigs30]

Finished just in time, should be up in the air tomorrow. The landing gear is removable for flight. The kit prop is 5 inches and that is too short for this bird so I will be flying with a 6 inch prop. Weight so far as shown is 16 grams but will go up with nose weight and rubber. As you can see I built this from the box with no modifications and used the kit decals. This is not really a scale bird so I kept the details at a minimum and should be a good flyer.

[scigs30]

Sorry, only able to upload 3 photos. Also, the tissue is the Guillows kit Grey tissue.

[Mitch]

VERY NICE!!! M

[Supercubber95]

Unbelievable, as usual...

[twospruces]

Thought I would post in here with my finished Typhoon. Not to water down a thread about perfection with my feeble attempt! Hope you don't mind Skigs30.

Anyhow, this was good fun to build and I hope it flies. I still have a bit of painting to do. Certainly all the tips I have read here on this forum has helped me out. Lots to learn still though. My work is still not too neat but getting better.

I thought I would use colored tissue for this - green with light camo on top and blue on the bottom. that was fine, but I should have used tan paper on the top and added green afterwards.. hard to add a light color on top of dark!

I used the wrong pattern for the landing gear, and as a result the gear is way out in front of the wing. A also left off the gear doors as I figured those would break off.

A neat trick that i used here was to provide a stopper for keeping the wheels on the axle by taking the sheath off of some power supply wiring, and gluing that on top of the axle wire. That' plus some clear plastic bushings to keep the wheels true. I had to make wheels from balsa here as my axles were a bit too short...balsa wheels are thinner.

Stickers went on ok, but I have some bubbles... the paper sagged a bit under the stickers when I applied them.

IMG-20130331-00041 (Large).jpg

IMG-20130331-00042 (Large).jpg

IMG-20130331-00043 (Large).jpg

It seems to be mostly balanced as it is, so I hope I can get her to fly!
cheers,