Sky9pilot: Check out the plans listing on  outerzone.uk  for many of the WW II vintage Comet Speed-O-Matic plans. I would suggest using the heaviest/strongest 1/16th balsa you can find for all the printwood parts, card stock formers and stringers (bass would be fine for the latter). I suppose one could use the excellent bass wood now available for all the parts. My bunch added all sorts of extra spars, diagonals, "braces to the braces", etc. as weight made these more flyable especially in the wind. Durable shafts/bearings for the free wheeling props are advisable. Ours were generally just a large pin stuck into a chunk of wood. It didn't really matter as the planes got used up fairly quickly mostly because of poorly executed dumb stunts (like ramp strikes when attempting carrier landings on a raised walkway). Another example: With the long pole and string, pull the plane into a vertical attitude directly above you and slack the string. The resulting "spin" (really a spiral dive due to the string drag/weight) required some sense of timing to avoid a crash. Outer wing weight? What's that? So many great memories come flooding back! This was really fun stuff!

Thanks for sharing the history "OldFordPilot"!  Gotta do some googling of those kits and products.  Sounds like great fun!

Had a good buddy in CA who worked on the F4D while he was in the Navy.  I gave him my red/white/black F4d pusher model  before I left California.  He had some great stories.  Thanks again for sharing.

Click here to see that build: Click Here
Sky9pilot

Great Subject!

Back in WW II days Comet came out with the 25 cent Speed-O-Matic series of then current fighters. These had 18 inch span, substitute wood (was it poplar?), cardboard formers you didn't have to cut out and NO rubber. The plans showed a flying method wherein the model was swung around on a very short thread attached to a wingtip. I started off with the P-47 and my buddy built the Fw 190. Of course, these planes ended up rather heavy and no attempt was made to fly them free flight. A nearby bamboo patch (in Orlando, FL) supplied 15 foot poles which, combined with nearly 20 feet of string, provided us with excellent "swingability." The props were freewheeling. Touch-and-go landings were possible as were "loops" which were not really such but looked like that from the swinger's perspective. My bunch built all of the 25 centers and some of the later 50 cent kits. My favorite was a "max-effort" (color doped, intricate canopy, interesting wing shape, Jac-O-Lac decals, etc. Vultee Vengeance. My buddy, Tom Riecken, built a TBF-1 as his "max-effort" project.

The provided materials were just right for this kind of flying: heavy and strong. Eventually we used moderately longer poles and string. The local S. H. Kress 5 & 10 store sold Dart brand clear cement. This was rather thin and runny. One of us started putting a drop of this on each tissue bay and rubbing it in. This amounted to clear doping the plane. This, of course, added weight and durability as well as improving the appearance. The best part was nibbling the dried cement off of your fingers later on.

We had a lot of fun with these neat models. We got so used to the wartime materials that we were not all that thrilled when balsa returned as it was not as well suited to this mode of flying and short, rubber powered flights didn't seem very exciting.