The Guillow’s Fly Boy was the first of the Build-n-Fly series that I built although this is the last in the series and would be the hardest to construct.  Having built model planes for many years I thought I could handle the construction.  In this series of planes after the initial hand launch glider, the rubber powered models add increasingly larger number of pieces in the structure.  Fly Boy is the only plane in the series that has a completely built-up fuselage structure.

This is also the largest plane in the series with a 21” wingspan and a length of 19 ¼”.  The longer plane makes for a stable plane but it is easy to have a plane that is tail heavy.  My plane did require some clay on the nose to balance correctly.  To reduce the weight of the plane, I used my own colored tissue and drilled holes in the plastic wheels.  I used dowels and small rubber bands to mount the wing also instead of one big rubber band over the wing and fuselage as shown on the plans.

As typical of designs of rubber powered model planes of many years ago, there a large number of tiny sticks making up the fuselage.  Nothing really hard about this but there will be a lot of cutting and gluing needed.  The wing is a 3-panel design with multiple spars in the wing.

Not sure what came in the kit for rubber but I used 3/16” Tan SS rubber.  This will give the plane a long gentle climb and nice cruise. It is not going to take it up at a near vertical angle.  Once adjusted for climb and turn the Fly Boy should give consistent flights that are beautiful to watch.

Bill Kuhl

Video of Fly Boy and Cloud Buster: E0FwV4_TcV4