Kyosho Catalinapby: Sport-scale ARF flying boat

Sport-scale ARF flying boat

The Catalina PBY is the most recognized flying boat ever produced, and it has served with distinction across the globe for over half a century. Model aviators who admire the PBY's unique look and history can now enjoy an excellent RC reproduction from Kyosho. This ARF has all the features we've come to expect from a Kyosho product-great scale looks, high-quality construction and excellent flight performance. For me, the opportunity to review the PBY was a bit of deja vu, as my first Model Airplane News article was a collaborative effort on a 40-size PBY with the late Dick Purdy 10 years ago.

WHAT'S IN THE BOX

Kyosho has some of the best box-art in the industry, and the beautifully printed full-color box the PBY comes in is no exception.

But that's only the beginning! The quality of this kit is apparent as soon as you open the box. Inside is a fantastic-looking, fiberglass-reinforced plastic (FRP) fuselage finished in a dark blue gelcoat. There are no seam lines or pinholes; the finish looks perfect. The fin is molded in as an integral part of the fuse. Plywood formers and hard points for the wing struts are already attached, as are the brass tubes for the removable wire landing gear. The wing comes in three sections and is balsa-sheeted foam-core covered with yellow, blue and black MonoKote. Plywood firewalls are already attached to the center section. The wingtips, wingtip floats and three-piece cowls are all made of FRP. The stab is precovered, built-up balsa, and all the movable control surfaces are precovered, solid balsa.

This plane is more than 80 percent complete and includes everything you need to get flying except a radio, engines, propellers and fuel tubing. Two fuel tanks, landing gear, tires, engine mounts, molded blister windows, decals and a very complete hardware package (with metric nuts and bolts) are all included. A 12-page instruction booklet guides you through assembly without the need for a full-size plan. The instruction booklet is much like the ones Kyosho uses for its RC cars. It includes a lot of symbols and drawings, with very few words. It is written in both Japanese and English, and all dimensions are in millimeters. My kit also included three sheets of supplemental instructions.

ASSEMBLY

As is the case with most ARFs, the covering on my PBY was a bit wrinkled, so I used a sealing iron and a heat gun to smooth things out before I began the assembly. The first steps in assembling the PBY dealt with the wing and engines, and this was, by far, the most time-consuming portion of the project. It isn't particularly difficult, but there is a lot to do. The ailerons are already installed on the outer panels, but the Mylar hinges have to be glued with a few drops of instant glue. I removed the covering from the servo cutouts in the outer wing panels and epoxied the hardwood servo-mounting blocks into place. I used two standard servos for the ailerons, and plastic covers are provided to cover the servos in the cutouts.

Next, I glued on the FRP wingtips and epoxied the fittings for the removable wingtip floats into the dowel hard points. The dowel hard points turned out to be the PBY's only major miss: they tore out during the first takeoff. The problem is that they are glued into the foam-core; they just don't provide enough gluing surface to be strong enough to take the stress on the tip floats during landing or takeoff. To correct this, I cut out a 1xS-inch opening in the sheeting on the bottom of the wing and carefully removed the foam. I then inserted a balsa block that was thick enough to contact the upper sheeting and that extended from the leading edge of the wing to the trailing edge. This block contained two dowel hard points for the float mounts, provided ample gluing surface and helped distribute the load imposed by the floats. I did not experience any problems after I made this modification.

I installed the engine mounts and fuel tanks next, followed by the throttle servos. I mounted two FMA mini servos for throttle control in the precut openings and covered them with the provided flat plastic covers. I used die-cut plywood wing joiners that slid into pockets in the wing panels to join the outer panels to the center section. I aligned the panels and glued them together with 30-minute epoxy, making sure the dihedral was the same on each outer panel.

I installed two side-mounted O.S. 15 LA engines and attached the three-piece cowls with small sheet-metal screws. This required a fair amount of trimming and fitting to get right. After preparing the four wing struts using the special hardware in the kit, I added the attachment fittings to the fuse and wing and temporarily attached the wing to the fuselage. While the wing was attached, I epoxied the stab to the fuse, then added the elevators, rudder and water rudder. Since the blue MonoKote on the rudder did not match the gelcoated fin, I removed the covering from the rudder and replaced it with red and white stripes. The blue on the wing and stab didn't match, either, but I left those alone.