GWS: Me-109 ARF

Fearsome foamie fighter

Do you want to fly tike a WW Il German ace without the hassle of building a complicated scale model? The Me-109 ARF from GWS can have you re-fighting the famous air battles of WW Il at your local park in no time. The kit is up to GWS's usual high standards, with lots of details molded into its injected-foam fuselage. It also includes a motor system, decals and hardware. The foam is painted in primer gray, but a scale paint job like the one you see here is only a few passes of an airbrush away. Then you'll be set to take on your friends in some of GWS's other scale WW Il warbirds in your own backyard battles.

CONSTRUCTION

GWS has done a great job of making the Me-109 easy to build. The step-by-step photo-illustrated instructions are very good, and the kit has relatively few parts. The fuselage, wing and tail are molded polystyrene foam. The motor and gearbox come preassembled. The remainder of the kit includes the prop, spinner, landing gear, control rods, hardware and a set of sharplooking decals. The four things I had to supply were the radio, the electronic speed control (ESC), the battery and a charger.

* Fuselage. The fuselage is molded in halves. I started the assembly according to the instructions by installing the control rods in each half of the fuselage. If you don't plan to paint your model, be careful not to scrape the stock paint off during assembly. I glued the fuselage halves together with 6-minute epoxy and held them together with rubber bands instead of the recommended tape. The motor and gearbox are mounted to the fuselage on a hardwood block that is epoxied into a cavity in the foam. The Me-109 has a hatch on the top that sits in the cockpit that allows easy battery changes without having to remove the wing. The canopy is attached to the removable hatch and held in place with a post and a magnet.

Last, I glued the mounting plate for! the steerable tailwheel to the rear of the fuselage.

* Wing assembly. The wing is a single, molded-foam unit. A single bamboo spar is glued in the center and covered with a black decal. You must cut the ailerons out of the wing, hinge them and bevel their leading edges. I used a new razorblade to cut the bevel. Install the torque rods before you hinge the ailerons to the wing. The slots for the torque rods are molded into the wing, which makes installation a snap. The hinges consist of a thin, flexible-plastic material. I cut slots in the wing and the ailerons with a hobby knife and test-fit them before I glued them with the supplied foam-safe cement. Cutting and hinging the ailerons was perhaps the most difficult part of the construction, and even a beginner will be able to accomplish this easily. The mounting point for the landing gear is epoxied to the bottom of the wing along with the reinforcement for the wing hold-down screw. In retrospect, I would have preferred a stronger gear-installation setup.

* Stabilizers. The horizontal stabilizer is a separate molded-foam piece, while the vertical stabilizer is molded into the fuselage. The elevator and rudder must be cut from the horizontal and vertical stabilizers and hinged in the same manner as you did the ailerons. The control horns snap in place, but the directions recommend using epoxy as well. I deviated from the instructions slightly by cutting the rudder off and sliding the fully assembled elevator and stab into place before I installed the rudder.

* Radio installation. This was a breeze. I used GWS Naro servos for the ailerons, elevator and rudder. The servos fit neatly into the fuselage, and I secured them with double-sided tape. 1 used Hitcc's Electron 6 receiver with my Flash S radio and secured it in the fuselage with some self-adhesive hook-and-loop tape. To control the motor, 1 used a GWS GS-IOO KSC. It is rated to 5 amps continuous and has a brake incorporated. It weighs less than ¼ ounce and has performed flawlessly. The removable hatch makes slipping the 80OmAh 9.6V battery into the plane very convenient, and it's nice to be able to leave the wing on when changing battery packs!

* Final assembly. When all the separate pieces were finished, it was time to fit them together. I glued the wing-mounting dowel pin plate to the front of the wing according to the instructions. After the glue had dried, I screwed the wing on so that I could properly align it to the tail surfaces. The last step was to secure the wire landing gear to the plastic mount with the provided screws. After the radio gear installation had been completed, I checked the balance and discovered that by moving the battery pack all the way forward, the plane balanced perfectly.

* Finishing. The best way to finish the Mc-109 is to airbrush it with water-based acrylic paint and then apply the supplied decals. I used Tamiya paint and an airbrush 1 picked up at a yard sale for five bucks. 1 used a piece of construction paper to mask the edges for my camouflage color scheme, but a good friend figured out that Post-it Notes from 3M work perfectly for masking without removing the base color. GWS even provides documentation and decals for four famous WW Il aces paint schemes.