I went on over to John Sandy’s garage to see his progress on the 78″ Kadet Senior he’s been building this winter. Although the plane kit itself was originally packaged in the early 80’s John didn’t take possession of the kit till recently. John won the plane during a raffle out at one of Steve Woodhouse’s Fly-Ins.
I won a gallon of glow fuel…I only fly electric.
The Kadet Senior is an all wood, hand-crafted plane. John had to make the wings, rudder, elevator, fuselage and other parts from a stack of balsa. Some of the internal parts were pre-cut some not.
The biggest change John made to the kit was setting it up as a 4-channel system. The original kit was a 3-channel, i.e., throttle, elevator and rudder.
John Sandy and his partially built SIG Kadet Senior
The plane will be powered by a glow fueled OS .61 which survived a lawn-dart incident out at the BSRC field
He hand-covers the plane with SIG Koverall fabric that'll be painted with a substance called Butyrate Dope. Yep. John has lots of dope. Cans of dope in all different colors. The fabric is wrapped around the plane's exterior parts such as the wing and elevator. It's then ironed flat to take out any wrinkles and then painted. Here you see the rudder and elevator ready for dope and John showing me a piece of the SIG Koverall fabic.
The 78 inch wing is ready for Koverall and dope.
The wing was designed to be held to the fuselage by rubber bands but John changed that to two sets of screws instead.
Here we have the fusalage interior along with a closeup of some bracing.
John makes all the nylon control rods and their supports with Gold-N-Rod.
