massive 12 ft foam b-52

 I've always had an obession with large multi engine aircraft, so last summer I decided to build a massive B-52 style bomber.

But before this during spring of 2015 I decided to build a parkjet style b-52 bomber, measuring a 67 inch wing span. It flew very well for having no airfoil and 4 2200 kv Parkjet motors. 

Heres a picture of it. It's had over 100 flites on it and its still going strong ! 

Fast forward a forward a few months and I went to the baylands flitetest meetup. There I met Peter Sirpol and he inspired me to go bigger! 

Heres a few videos of me flying my v1 b-52 at baylands, it's featured in the flitetest video too! 

 Right at the end of May 2015 my buddy Colin and I got to work building the wings for 200% B-52 

We ended up going to dollar tree and completely buying out their foam board selection. 

Just to build the wings it took 16 sheets of foam board because in many places inside the wing we had to double up and even triple up foam on certain stress points. 

Here is the first parts of the wing being cut out and glued together.

We decided to go with a simple box spar and less sweep on the wings, something like 25 degrees instead of 34 degrees sweep like on the real one. This was to allow a better aspect ratio and a better cg.

Once we had the box spars built and glued in we started sheeting the two outer panels and cutting out alierons/holes for the servo.

 Each half took about 6-8 hours to do and ended up being a lot more work than we thought!

 Here is my friend Colin for size comparison.......

Once the wings were about done we started on the fuse. We went through four packs of razor blades just to cut and bevel everything out at this point. Here is the start of it and the first informal fitment of the tail.

The tail portion was built sepretaly then attached via 15 minute epoxy and wood joiners. I didnt take a good picture of it when I was building it but the arrow points to the seem.

Once I had it all glued, I mounted the wings on top to see how I was going to fit them. I also built a nose which I eventually threw away because it didn't fit very well. Also here is the original b-52 fuse for comparison.

At this point i have most of the electronics mounted minus the motors and esc's. I figured out a 3 spar system that is pretty rigid, combined with wing struts which I had not yet mounted.

The nose section is built out of 3mm depron and is magnetic so I can access batteries and electronics. This one is pretty beat up but I made a template so more can be made if need be.

Here is the wing joiner box, it has 3 carbon fiber rods that run through it to hold the wing and give it its sweep. On the bottom side there are wooden rods that give it strength so it wont flex. This is the back bone of the whole aircraft.

Here is an awesome video a friend did for the maiden flight. I was very very suprised how well it flew right off the bat. Its really slow, nimble, and forgiving.

After the maiden we made several mods incuding more wing structure, a bomb bay, magnetic nose, some art, larger wheels, and then we painted her with some airforce gray.

Here she is in her current state, shes always under going mods. I have plane to turn her into a mothership to launch an rc cruise missiles.

Recap

All in all this one of my favorite scratch builds I've ever done. Building something of this magnitude is no easy task  but I really enjoy being able to fly my own giant scale bombering anywhere I go. The cool thing about building this was the fact that you can apply any basic scratch built model techniques to any size aircraft you want. For example the wings are built essentially the same way you would build any other flitetest style aircraft. One other cool thing about this aircraft is the fact that building something this larges allows it to be verry versitile. I've been able to fly it as a crowd pleaser, use it as a mother ship to drop aircraft, and even drop up to four pound payloads. (Bombs, candy, parachutest, etc).  A downside to building an aircraft this large is space. I built this to exactly fit in an 8 foot truck bed with nose cone off and the fuse angled slightly.  This is just one of those aircraft that dosen't store very well or assemble quickly.

The one thing that  I absolutely love about this model is its flight characteristics. With no bomb load this flys almost like a bixler believe it or not. It has an awesome glide slope and really low stall speed. It lifts off reasonably quick and only needs quarter power to cruise at 30mph once it's on step. It's very forgiving and slow. This plane loves rudder in those nice slow turns. I built it some what tail heavy too so it would fly slower, this is partly because I  am using very small battery packs. At one point in the second flight video I even get it to do a bit of low end high alpha.

To sum this all up if you plan on building a very large aircraft make sure you build a smaller model first!! That way you get a basic idea of its flite characteristics and what works and what doesn't.  

specs: B-52 

wingspan: 136in

length: 120in

rudder height: 34in

weight: unkown buts its really light for its size !

power: two eflite power 32's spinning counter rotating 13/8 APC props, running off of dual castle 80 amp esc's and two 4200 4s turnigy batteries in parallel

servos: 5 futuaba 304's

Bomb bay: 6 hobby king bomb drop units

8 channel spektrum reciever 

A TON of servo extension

dollar tree foam board 16 

pink panther insulation board 2

4 packs of 15 minute epoxy 

6 bags of high temp hot glue

An uncountable amount of knife blades 

build time: 6 weeks on and off

8 carbon rods 

Over all cost was around $650+ to build my own giant scale bomber.

One more video of its slow flight ability and how it flys with a heavy breeze while drones are chasing it.

This is my favorite scratch build to date!!! Thanks Peter and flitetest for the inspiration!

Big thanks to my homie Colin for helping fund and build this beast!!!!