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LW-PLA Spitfire-ish Rubber Band Plane — image 1
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LW-PLA Spitfire-ish Rubber Band Plane

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a LW PLA Rubber Band plane inspired by the Spitfire - First Attempt at LW Plane

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This is my first attempt at designing a lightweight (LW) rubber band-powered plane—and yes, it flies remarkably well! Most of the airframe is printed in Vase Mode using LW-PLA, which can be quite finicky and requires some fine-tuning to suit your printer setup. If you're new to it, I highly recommend checking out this guide: https://forum.bambulab.com/t/printing-with-lightweight-pla-lw-pla-part-3-other-settings/9300.

Assembly requires glue—super glue or plastic cement (the same type used for Airfix models works well). For the fuselage, I suggest printing with 2 or 3 bottom layers and using a scalpel to cut a slot for the rubber band. This gives you a more solid bonding surface. The wing position allows for a bit of adjustment during gluing, which helps with pre-balancing depending on the propeller you use. I used my Auto Feathering Propeller (linked on my profile) for this build.

The Elevators are not modelled - I opted for a simple foam board and tape solution for the elevators to cut down on print time, and it serves as the main trimming surface.

The prop plate, wing-body fairing, and tail mount are all printed in standard PLA.

I’m sharing this as version 0.5, and I welcome any feedback. I plan to continue experimenting with LW-PLA and other printing techniques to further reduce weight. Future iterations will likely eliminate the wing-body fairing and trim more material from the mid and tail sections. The forward section will stay as-is to provide some durability for those inevitable hard landings.

this is more inspired by the Spitfire than a Scale model, so don't expect perfect scale, it was all done by eye and guesswork.

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