#1
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Where do you source your aircraft plans?
Hey. I am getting pretty good at designing basic card models and feel ready to make the jump to light speed. Wait. I mean, I want to try my hand at modeling a reasonably accurate flying thingy.
To make a reasonably accurate flying thingy I need reasonably accurate flying thingy plans. My attempts to find such plans on the internet have yielded tremendous great gobs of absolutely nothing useful. So, intrepid ladies and gentleman, or sundry women and dastardly knaves, I really am not picky in this regard, where might I find not so secret treasure troves of free and mostly accurate aircraft plans? To be clear, I am hoping for plans with fuselage and wing cross sections. If no such a repository exists, where do your plans come from? If it matters, I am particularly interested in American jet aircraft of the 1950s and 1960s. Thank you in advance! Now, back to chopping up Mars. Alas, poor Mars, I knew you well. |
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#2
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Well... Internet, of course. That is my first line of call.
If I am picky, or I think the internet source is not reliable, or am designing an especially detailed model, a good idea is to find dedicated books on the subject. These will normally be much more comprehensive and accurate than any internet source, and will also provide plenty of images for detail reference. If you still can't find blueprints, then it will be up to yourself. Get plenty and plenty of photos, examine the aircraft from multiple angles. After you settle on the general planform in each direction, try to use silhouette, lighting and shadows to identify how each part of the surface curves. Also, use your knowledge to approach the shape from an engineering perspective: what is this part made for and why should it be shaped like this. Reverse-engineering is as difficult as it is powerful, try it. The early jets sport relatively simple cross-sections. You shouldn't have much issue figuring them out.
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#3
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Here is a link to another forum, where I´m active, mainly cars, but there is a section for planes:
Planes | SMCars.Net - Car Blueprints Forum another source: plan 3-vues When I´m searching for blueprints, I use the picture search of google. And there search for big pictures. |
#4
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Thank you very much, Moritzamica! Those links led to some very useful plans.
Thank you, Lex. I am hoping to find sites dedicated to aircraft plans like the ones linked by Moritzamica. Drawingdatabase.com also contains many useful aircraft plans. I stumbled upon that one yesterday afternoon. Finally, I invested in some calipers which will allow me to measure plastic model parts. |
#5
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Aerofred.com
I just discovered Aerofred.com I have not looked for jets there, but I found the perfect plans to help me design a Piper PA-12 Supercruiser.
I just looked and I found that they have a lot of jets from the 1950s. It is a free site intended to help RC modelers. Many of the plans are true scale. The smaller ones are modified to make them aerodynamically stable. You can see most everything with out signing up, but you need to sign in to download. |
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#7
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A place I use extensively is The largest free blueprint and vector drawing collection on the Internet - 20000 vector templates for sale.
I think they search the web and gather plans together. Quality varies greatly, all the way from tiny badly pixelated and useless drawings, to huge detailed multiviews that give you more information than you could ever use. They also have a premium service that sells cleaned up vector based plans, but they're expensive. In general, I just use 3-views as a place to start. They tell me how long the fuselage is, how long the wings are, and in general where everything goes. I also gather as many pictures of the plane off of the internet as I can to study the shape. I've even been known to get up close and personal at air museums and airports to visually inspect the real plane. Oh, and another thing about 3-views I've discovered. Just because there are a top side and front view doesn't mean they'll be usable as is. Usually the first thing I do with a 3-view is go in and make sure all 3 angles are the same scale. Then straighten them out so they're perfectly straight horizontally and vertically. |
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