Scratch-built R/C seaplane

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By Gareth Branwyn
Posted 2010/01/28 @ 3:46 pm
Category Fun & Games

Here’s a video of a scratch-built “foamy” R/C model of a seaplane that can actually take off and land on water. “Foamies” is the name given to the class of model planes built out of the insulation foam that can be found at home/hardware stores.

ModelAero also sells a kit version of this build.

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3 Responses to Scratch-built R/C seaplane

RocketGuy on January 28th, 2010 at 5:04 pm said:

There are several types of foam aircraft out there. One of the more popular is EPP foam. This foam resulted from Cisco’s research into packaging foam and is incredibly damage resistant. Cisco had been shipping very expensive routers all over during the internet boom, and many of them were destroyed enroute by bad handling. So they dropped a few million on foam research, and voila, we have EPP. I’ve had several flying wings made of it, and you could fly them into a chain link fence at 50mph, and just pick them up and fly them again immediately. The only down side is that unlike styrofoam(which is also used), it’s not stiff enough on it’s own, so you have to use a spar for stiffness, usually a carbon fiber arrow shaft cut to length.

Happy skies!

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Johnny on January 28th, 2010 at 5:56 pm said:

A simple webcam attached and using a custom iPad application to view and control the airplane.

COOL !!

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mightyohm on January 28th, 2010 at 9:28 pm said:

That looks like FUN!

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