very decent first shot at the Crusader.
However some shapes were not complying to
the blueprints we had, so I spent quite a bit of
time digitalizing the Crusader skeleton and
fine tuning the scanned surfaces to match the
documentation.
This CAD was then converted to Gcode and
milled in two halves from a solid blocks of
MDF with our robot. The surface came out
really well and after some priming/sanding,
we had a very nice looking Crusader fusela-
ge! However, this was not enough for me as
the pictures and visits to a real Crusader sho-
wed the beating of war operations of these
embarked airframes. The skin of the plane
was extensively dented and wrinkled. So we
decided to include these features in our plug.
The wavy pattern of every stringer was repro-
duced by hand in a subtle manner. This can-
not be seen in straight light but is very evident
in tangential light conditions. I believe this has
never been done before on a model to this
extent.
In parallel, I had started looking at what I
could do for the wings, stabilizers and fin. The
original plane had a relatively thin and pointy
NACA airfoil, optimized for supersonic flight. I
was concerned about using this at very low
Reynolds numbers of 200,000 on a model. So
I started working on different aero options in
XFLR5. It was immediately evident that the
original airfoil would be unsuitable for this size
and wing loading and would result in a disa-
ster. The simulation was showing very high
stall speeds and wing tip stall tendency. I loo-
ked at my airfoil library and decided to go forThis article is about the journey that brought
me to introduce the Crusader to the market.
It all started with the passion of one man:
Woody Lee, COO at Ultimate Jets, has
always been a Crusader lover. He is one of
the few owners to have a still airworthy JD
Enterprise Crusader. He built it about 10
years ago and still flies it on a regular basis.
This is one of the very few F-8’s I have ever
seen flying successfully as a model.
About 3 years ago, as we talked about the
Crusader over a drink, he told me that he
knew a group of modellers from Texas who
had made a 1/7 scale plug but never flew it.
After discussing about this at length, we deci-
ded to get in touch with these people and see
what was left of this project.
It appeared that the moulds were in storage in
an attic somewhere and that we could get
them to our Houston facilities.
So we did. Unfortunately, the molds were
quite thin and warped in all the directions. The
wing mould was unusable and the fuselage
was bent. Anyway, the size of the plane was
nice. Not too big, not too small. So I decided
to salvage the fuselage and shipped it to my
Dubai factory. After a couple of months, we
got a thick fuselage plug out of the mould. The
fuselage was bent, but I managed to strai-
ghten it decently by cutting it into 5” sections.
At that point, It appeared that getting it back to
good scale standards would be a lot of work.
Also we just had received our first Kuka mil-
ling robot. So I decided to 3D scan that shape
and convert it into CAD.
That turned out quite well and I rapidly got aF-8E Crusader
The new model from Ultimate Jets - Enata
AUTHOR: OLIVIER NICOLAS
The original plug taken from the moulds
of the Houston group. Not straight.A great 3/4 view of the Crusader. The angled
wing and its vertical front face painted in red
give it this very specific and aggressive look.Crusader_Layout 1 07/03/18 17.13 Pagina 2