Florio Flyer XP-1 Glider

[dlazarus6660]

Florio Flyer XP-1 Glider, I had several of these in the early 90's. My son and I had a ball with these gliders. I got a hold of Jim Florio when I lived in Florida. He lived about 40 miles away from me. He sent me the body of the gilder without wings for free. That's all I needed. The glider is packed away now and I don't want to search for it in hot weather.
I found the glider online, but I can' open the plans. Can anybody else? If you do, could you email it to me, please. Thanks and enjoy!

http://makezine.com/projects/make-31/folding-wing-glider-rockets-up-glides-down/

[mycrofte]

The Hobby Lobby here has the folding foam planes that could be used.
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[Ltvscout]

This post got me thinking about being a kid again. I was ALWAYS flying something, whether balsa planes, RC planes, U-Control planes, kites, homemade hot air balloons, water rockets or model rockets. I did a search of American Junior Aircraft and looked at a few sites. Those were not the planes I recall buying/flying. I kept looking and came across this site:

http://www.oldwoodtoys.com/new_page_2.htm

The brand I bought the most of was North Pacific. I'll bet many of you remember these as well. I also recall buying/flying folding wing balsa planes, but it wasn't the American Junior or North Pacific brand. I've yet to go through all the companies on the above site, so I may find it yet. Now that I know the name brand of the planes I flew, I'm going to have to see if I can find some on eBay. Tami will love that I found something else to collect. hehehe

[dlazarus6660]

This post got me thinking about being a kid again. I was ALWAYS flying something, whether balsa planes, RC planes, U-Control planes, kites, homemade hot air balloons, water rockets or model rockets. I did a search of American Junior Aircraft and looked at a few sites. Those were not the planes I recall buying/flying. I kept looking and came across this site:

http://www.oldwoodtoys.com/new_page_2.htm

The brand I bought the most of was North Pacific. I'll bet many of you remember these as well. I also recall buying/flying folding wing balsa planes, but it wasn't the American Junior or North Pacific brand. I've yet to go through all the companies on the above site, so I may find it yet. Now that I know the name brand of the planes I flew, I'm going to have to see if I can find some on eBay. Tami will love that I found something else to collect. hehehe

I was the same way. Always had a plane in my hand or something flying.
I got the pic's to prove it! Lol.
NP Sleek Streak was my flyer but the NP Star Flyer was the coveted choice. It was BIG! They come up on Fee-Bay every once in a while. When I talked to Jim of Florio Flyer fame, he told me to keep his price down, he would 'employ' the neighborhood kids to help make parts and pay them with a glider.

[mycrofte]

I need to find the balsa/rubber band plane my brother gave me this last Christmas...
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[Ironnerd]

At work I am "the Glider Guy". I'm always building White Wings paper planes at breaks and lunches, or going around getting everyone else's clam-shell food containers to use as material for foam gliders. I made a really nice "Estes Nighthawk" glider out of two food containers and a plastic knife. It flew a little too well and was never seen again.

Some of those old wood planes were beautiful! Makes me wanna give balsa a try.

[blackshire]

This post got me thinking about being a kid again. I was ALWAYS flying something, whether balsa planes, RC planes, U-Control planes, kites, homemade hot air balloons, water rockets or model rockets. I did a search of American Junior Aircraft and looked at a few sites. Those were not the planes I recall buying/flying. I kept looking and came across this site:

http://www.oldwoodtoys.com/new_page_2.htm

The brand I bought the most of was North Pacific. I'll bet many of you remember these as well. I also recall buying/flying folding wing balsa planes, but it wasn't the American Junior or North Pacific brand. I've yet to go through all the companies on the above site, so I may find it yet. Now that I know the name brand of the planes I flew, I'm going to have to see if I can find some on eBay. Tami will love that I found something else to collect. heheheThe American Junior "Army Interceptor" folding wing balsa catapult gliders were also used as very cheap gunnery targets during World War II (see: http://www.google.com/#fp=8fd259d5961a0882&q=american+junior+army+interceptor ). Also, speaking of North Pacific:

They made two swept-wing balsa chuck gliders (that I saw in stores back then--they made more than those two). One was the common chuck glider size (having a 9" or so wing span), while the other--which flew amazingly well--was *tiny*, with wings that spanned only five or six inches. This was the Strato (see: http://www.oldwoodtoys.com/north_pacific.htm ). Its moderately-swept wings had a (nearly) constant chord, and they had red ink "scalloped" patterns printed on them. If someone here still has one, it would make a great "minimum material" glider to clone, perhaps using laser-cut parts to enable quantity production.

[naoto]

I'm always building White Wings paper planes at breaks and lunches ...(snip)...
Speaking of paper aeroplanes... have you checked out stuff here (sites are mostly Japanese-language) [Okay, these might not be adaptable for use as parasite gliders for model rocket, but then they're certainly likely to be fun to put together and fly] ?

"profile" type (i.e. fuselage is flat piece)
http://www.infosnow.ne.jp/~suzuki-a/
http://homepage3.nifty.com/papercraft/ (click on the red box)
http://www.amy.hi-ho.ne.jp/h-nishimoto/index.html (click on pcraft link)
http://www10.ocn.ne.jp/~papiy/home.html (click on "Paper gliders" link)
http://staticwind.soragoto.net/index.html (click on "gallery")

fuselage is 3-D style
http://ojimak.web.fc2.com/index.html (note: some models like the Osprey don't fly)
http://www2u.biglobe.ne.jp/~poseidon/e_index.html

[Ironnerd]

Okay, so some topic drift here.

I love the MU-2 model. Always been a favorite plane. Thanks!

[blackshire]

Okay, so some topic drift here.

I love the MU-2 model. Always been a favorite plane. Thanks!Here are a couple more--Zovirl Industries' G-1 and G-4 laminated cardstock glider plans (downloadable free here: http://www.zovirl.com/tags/paper-airplanes/ ); flight trimming instructions are included. The G-1 could probably fly on a rocket as a parasite boost-glider, like the Estes Firefly and the Estes Multi-Roc's "T"-tailed glider.

[BEC]

The American Junior "Army Interceptor" folding wing balsa catapult gliders were also used as very cheap gunnery targets during World War II (see: http://www.google.com/#fp=8fd259d5961a0882&q=american+junior+army+interceptor ). Also, speaking of North Pacific:

They made two swept-wing balsa chuck gliders (that I saw in stores back then--they made more than those two). One was the common chuck glider size (having a 9" or so wing span), while the other--which flew amazingly well--was *tiny*, with wings that spanned only five or six inches. This was the Strato (see: http://www.oldwoodtoys.com/north_pacific.htm ). Its moderately-swept wings had a (nearly) constant chord, and they had red ink "scalloped" patterns printed on them. If someone here still has one, it would make a great "minimum material" glider to clone, perhaps using laser-cut parts to enable quantity production.

When I was a grade schooler (early 1960s) the North Pacific Strato was a favorite. They were bigger than five or six inches and cost a nickel! They flew very very well. As balsa prices went up, North Pacific made all their models (the Strato, the 10 cent Stunt Flyer glider, the 15 cent Skeeter rubber powered plane, the 25 cent Sleek Streek rubber powered plane with wheels and the seemingly gigantic and expensive 49 cent Star Flyer) all smaller and smaller until their flying qualities diminished noticeably. Only then - many years later - did the prices start to go up.

I always liked the North Pacific models better than their competitors and, as a child in Denver, and later Santa Fe, if there really was a place called "Bend, Oregon" where these planes said they were from. Of course I can now say yes, and I've been there....but this was long after North Pacific as I remember it was gone.

I did occasionally manage to get a folding wing AJ Interceptor....a truly amazing model. I may have, somewhere, a remade AJ Interceptor from when the late Frank Macy tried to revive American Junior....he used to come to the now defunct Northwest Model Expo in Puyallup, Washington in February.....

Ah the memories....

[blackshire]

Indeed. Yes, Bend, Oregon and Penrose, Colorado were both mysterious places to me at that tender age, because I knew of no other products that were made in them. In my child's imagination, I pictured them as being perhaps slightly "Willy Wonka-esque" company towns, which existed for no other purpose--although I could *never* envision Vern Estes dressed the way Gene Wilder was in the 1971 movie... :-) Also:

In addition to their gliders and rubber-powered model airplanes, I once had one of North Pacific's odd "Whirl-E-Bird" adjustable boomerangs (see: http://www.flight-toys.com/boomerang/collectable/tb53.html ); it consisted of two flat, constant-chord hardwood wings (which were stained or painted yellow), which had beveled leading and trailing edges to create the airfoil shape. One wing had a red plastic sleeve clip cemented to one end, through which the other wing could be slid (it was a tight friction-fit) to adjust the boomerang's flight characteristics. Well:

It flew okay, but unlike the Wham-O traditional Australian style red plastic boomerang that I also had (the new reproductions of it are much lighter and don't fly as well), the "Whirl-E-Bird" never came all the way back to me, no matter how much I adjusted it. One day, when I was flying it in a hilltop cemetary a few hundred feet from our house near Young Harris, Georgia, it flew in front of the Sun and I lost track of it. As I was walking around the graveyard looking for it (I had noticed a fresh open grave), a funeral procession drove up! I got some strange looks as I kept walking around between the tombstones, looking back and forth along the ground. After covering a grid pattern over the whole hilltop, I finally gave up, knowing it must have landed in a nearby thicket, which I wasn't about to look in because it was just the kind of place where venomous snakes would hang around...

[dlazarus6660]

For those interested in North Pacific Sleek Streak, here ya go!

http://www.nosf.ca/docs/heykid1.pdf

[dlazarus6660]

My Florio Flyer XP-1 Rocket Plane.

[BEC]

For those interested in North Pacific Sleek Streak, here ya go!

http://www.nosf.ca/docs/heykid1.pdf

I remember that series of articles. It was published in the late great Model Builder magazine quite some time ago (back when you could easily go buy a Sleek Streek).

Whoever scanned it clipped off the tops and bottoms of the pages so you couldn't see the source info.

Poking around on the net with the magazine in mind led to this: http://digitekbooks.com/index.php/model-aviation-magazines-books-plans/aeromodelling-model-builder-aviation-magazines/model-builder-magazine-dvd-collection.html

I have an almost complete physical collection of MB, but this is very very tempting.

[stefanj]

MAKE Magazine published a nice piece about the flip-wing catapult plane. I seem to recall that someone is selling kits again.

[ed.brown]

http://www.modelairplanepages.com/aj-index/aj-index.html
is a website devoted to making your own Jim Walker Interceptor Clone. Never could afford one of these when I was a pup (I believe they were 50 cents and the "74" gliders were 10 cents at that time. There was always a vendor in the parking lot at Lambert Field in St. Louis at that time.

This is the folding wing glider in my mind.

Enjoy,
Ed

[blackshire]

http://www.modelairplanepages.com/aj-index/aj-index.html
is a website devoted to making your own Jim Walker Interceptor Clone. Never could afford one of these when I was a pup (I believe they were 50 cents and the "74" gliders were 10 cents at that time. There was always a vendor in the parking lot at Lambert Field in St. Louis at that time.

This is the folding wing glider in my mind.

Enjoy,
EdThank you for posting this. This folding-wing concept should work for boost-gliders (B/Gs) and Rocket Gliders (RGs). It should make possible B/Gs and RGs with longer, narrower, sailplane-type wings, so that they would have lower sink rates (shorter wings could be used to make "foul-weather" B/Gs and RGs). For "fair-weather" models with longer wings, the trailing folded wings (in the powered ascent configuration) would give the models trailing-stick stability like a skyrocket's.

[dlazarus6660]

Ahhh the memories. When I think about all the rubber band planes, gliders and kites I bought when I was a kid(I still am). It still amazes and tickles me on where I got the money to buy these treasures. My mother would yell at me asking where I got the money? "Mom, I told you this before!! I got the money from the local junk yard!"
There were 6 local junk yards in my end of town, three within a 1/4 mile of each other. I would spend a Saturday morning, or most any weekday during the summer, scrounging around the newly junked cars filling my pockets with loose change. On a good day I would walk out with $20.00 easy. Of the six, three are gone to development and EPA.
I wonder to think how many thousands of dollars are destroyed each year in loose change in junked cars?

[luke strawwalker]

Ahhh the memories. When I think about all the rubber band planes, gliders and kites I bought when I was a kid(I still am). It still amazes and tickles me on where I got the money to buy these treasures. My mother would yell at me asking where I got the money? "Mom, I told you this before!! I got the money from the local junk yard!"
There were 6 local junk yards in my end of town, three within a 1/4 mile of each other. I would spend a Saturday morning, or most any weekday during the summer, scrounging around the newly junked cars filling my pockets with loose change. On a good day I would walk out with $20.00 easy. Of the six, three are gone to development and EPA.
I wonder to think how many thousands of dollars are destroyed each year in loose change in junked cars?

That's interesting... and the owners would let you poke around like that??

I'd be worried about taking a ride through the crusher... LOL:) Course maybe I watched "Goldfinger" too much too...

Later! OL JR :)

[dlazarus6660]

That's interesting... and the owners would let you poke around like that??
Later! OL JR :)

Not really, but keep in mind this was late 60's to the mid 70's. No computers to let them know what was in stock. I would ask to see what came in or ask if he had a certain part. He knew what I was really doing but pretended not to. There was this one mean guy that I would sneak around to the back, climb the fence, feed the junkyard dog and rummage around a few cars. I only got caught once.

[foamy]

Not really, but keep in mind this was late 60's to the mid 70's. No computers to let them know what was in stock. I would ask to see what came in or ask if he had a certain part. He knew what I was really doing but pretended not to. There was this one mean guy that I would sneak around to the back, climb the fence, feed the junkyard dog and rummage around a few cars. I only got caught once.
Ah. The "Good 'ol days." I kinda feel bad for the current generations.