While rebuilding the Juliet, I had plenty of ideas on how the structure could have been improved, lightened and made easier to “operate”. Since the ideas kept piling up after the first flights, some of them found a way into the model after our first little crash. Of course they were limited to small design corrections. We just put all the rest in a drawer for later use.

In the meantime, we were already looking forward to the Twin Beech as the next big plane to build, so there wasn’t time to think about other projects.

It just happened that at some point we had the need to test the materials and techniques we were planning to use on the C18. Would they actually work, and were we able to make them properly with just our tools and space available? On top of that, we were using for the first time a CAD software to design a plane, but we were still unsure on how to translate it from the screen to the real thing.

So many questions and so many doubts. It just made sense to make some tests.

We started with the materials. Specifically, a sandwich using balsa and carbon fiber in different proportions and layouts. The properties were even better than we were hoping, but still, how to work with it and make precise structural elements from those first, messy tests?

The A1-D Project

The Juliet II was born to answer all theese questions, and more. It had to prove the whole process, from the screen to the production to the flight, and as we were at it, be a sensible improvement over A1-C, and allow to experiment with some video recording, if not FPV flying.

Although the model is based on the Juliet, it’s larger, with bigger control surfaces, more space in a completely new fuselage, and removable wings (mainly to test this feature for the C18).

Follow the progress of the construction in the next posts!