New Short Kit – the Peanut Aircraft Designs Stallion

If you can’t wait, you can find the Short Kit HERE. Download printed tissue template for this color scheme HERE. Scroll down for the rest of the story (and a test flight video!)…

The Aircraft Designs “Stallion” has been a favorite of mine since I saw the February 1995 issue of Private Pilot on the newsstand in my local supermarket. I bought the magazine immediately. There wasn’t such a thing as “searching the internet” back then, so this was a great source of scale documentation. I was (and still am) always on the lookout for high-wing airplanes with retract gear and without struts. I took it home and quickly started to lay out a Peanut plan. I built two Peanuts – if I remember, #1 was smashed and #2 flew away. This is the long-awaited third Peanut, built as a prototype for a laser-cut short kit.

Feb 1995 Private Pilot magazine and the Aircraft Designs Stallion

the inside of the magazine with an early CAD Peanut plan.

The build is “typical” – no surprises or complications. It is a box fuselage with a few formers and stringers. I designed it to be light, so I used light wood and many of the formers and stringers are from 1/32″ sheet. My target weight was the unobtainable 5 grams. I hit 7 grams, due to a 3D printed prop and spinner.

I wanted to keep it light because my goal was to fly it on a loop of 1/16″ rubber. I am pretty sure I lost #2 flying in the McCook Squadron’s “Watson Challenge” – where you can fly any plane with a 24″ strand of 1/8″ (I stripped it down to 2 strands of 1/16″). My records also show that the old one weighed 5.5 grams – but it may have been more, as I only had a homemade balance beam back then.

I also tried a bunch of “new” things on this model. I installed one of my light-weight mini Gizmo Geezer Nose Buttons (read about them HERE). Also (as noted in the linked article), I’ve been working with Archie Adamisin on 3D printed propellers. I put one of his on my Peanut Corsair and had great luck. This time, I wanted to replicate the 3-bladed propeller on the full scale aircraft, so I took one of his 3D files and modified it what I imagined would be a good prop for the model. This one is a 3-Blade of 4″ diameter, 5″ pitch, and a 0.4″ blade width. it looks quite scale!

The prop is driven by a Garami-style clutch bound to one of the blades and one of my tiny 3D-printed Clutch Drivers. This is all hidden under a 3D printed Spinner. The prop and necessary equipment added just about 1.5 grams to the build. So, between all that plastic and the sheeted nose (1/64″ balsa), I probably could have saved between 1/2 and 1 gram of weight.

As the beautiful fall day warmed up and started to burn off the dew this afternoon, I loaded up a 10″ loop of 1/16″ rubber and headed out to the back yard. After a little bit of added tail weight and a few twists on the adjustable nose button screws, I got some pretty decent test flights. Here is the one I filmed.