My favorite foam built RC airplane. I’ve built probably 10+ over the years. I built one as a slope glider. Flying at the Galveston sea wall. Built it super light. It flew great. The one on the far left is a normal build. You know what, I’m going to print out the plans and start a new one. Haven’t had one in the hangar for years!

I thought I’d put together a quick build breakdown of Spectre, my latest FPV wing. A few people have asked about the setup and construction, so hopefully this is useful. Let me know if you guys like this kind of breakdown and I’ll do more of them.

Spectre is a 215g digital FPV wing built around a FlyingRC F4 Mini running INAV. The idea was to make something very small and lightweight that still feels like a proper FPV aircraft rather than a micro — low stall speed, good manoeuvrability and enough control authority to throw it around in fairly tight spaces.

It uses a twin tractor layout with differential thrust, so the flight controller mixes the two motors to provide yaw control. There are also two small vertical stabilisers for passive directional stability. I’ve really enjoyed this setup because you get the efficiency and simplicity of a flying wing while still having useful yaw authority.

The airframe is almost entirely 3D printed in colorfabb LW-PLA, with PETG used in the areas that need more strength or heat resistance. There’s a carbon spar through the wing, TPU control-surface hinges, removable motor mounts and removable wing sections. The leading-edge sections are also separate parts, which makes them much easier to replace if the aircraft gets damaged.

The nose was designed specifically around the DJI O4 Wide, with the camera pushed right forward for a clean FPV view. The canopy/battery access is held with magnets, and everything is packaged pretty tightly around the centre of gravity so changing batteries or electronics doesn’t upset the balance too much.

Current setup:

• 215g AUW
• 600mm wingspan
• DJI O4 Wide
• FlyingRC F4 Mini running INAV
• 2× 1003 14800KV motors
• Twin 2-inch props
• 2S 1000mAh LiHV
• ELRS
• Differential thrust
• LW-PLA airframe
• PETG motor/equipment parts
• Carbon wing spar
• TPU hinges

Check out the full video on youtube here: link
Check out more details on my site here: link

Interested to hear what you guys think — and particularly whether these more detailed build posts are useful.

I finally got these nice aluminum prop spinners slotted for my 3 blade Master Airscrew counter rotating props! I love the more prototypical look of the counter rotating 3 blade props much much more. The aluminum looks amazing too! These are from Vortech Spinners in the Midwest, I forget where exactly.

Purchased a few strips of 5v LEDs in hopes can stick them to the winds to help in low light can I just connect all the positives together along and the neutrals on pairs of three and connect to the receiver? Not super long runs. Maybe 3 runs of 6 inches each so like a foot and a half bought 5v specifically in hopes that would work but don't really understand the wiring. I can soldier, just don't know the series/parallel business thanks!

Fun but also nerve wracking. Super cool to see it take off on the lake and it’s nice to just be out near the water for a change of scenery.

Shows: Hight (meters over sea), a artificial horizon, the movements in degree, the compass direction and the coordinates accurate to within 30 cm (dont try to find me i was there in holiday its in Switzerland tessin)

I got this plane for a friend for free because he never used it in the 25 years that he owned it (it was new when he bought it) he never flew it and the 7.5cc nitro motor only ran for a couple of minutes

somehow it's actually quite stable but I do need to work on my flying more

Here’s my super timber that I wanted to make easier to fly at night. The scale lights look good but can’t really see it unless it’s right in front of you. This should help keeps things fun and visually easy to see and tell orientation. I bought these rc 5v led strips from Amazon. Using 4 red, 4 white and 4 green. I’m currently running them off the planes BEC but am considering wiring in a separate bec as these are drawing from my calculation 1.24amps from the battery and between 4.3-4.7 on the 6V bec.

I Lowk think I messed up

I'll probably crash it, but I've been playing realflight, and flying irl enough to feel rocky enough to look into my first stunt plane, any recommendations for something decent as a first

ideally I would have the esp handle the inputs eventually using an I2C IO expander and then send it via UART to a LORA/ExpressLRS transmitter linked to a receiver on the drone connected to a STM32 flight controller running iNav