RV-3Bravo

Well Known Member
Who do you all get your designs from? The reason I ask in here is because I am thinking about doing designs for people as an additonal income. I will mainly cater to the RV crowd, but will eventually branch off to others when the time arises. I have a few designs in my portfolio, and would like to get them out there without any theft. Any clue on how I can get started would be appreciated.
 
Scheme Designers

Check out Scheme Designers - they are doing this. There is always room for another competitor in just about any market.
 
rvwannabe said:
Who do you all get your designs from? .


I struggled with the Valkyrie's design for a very long time - I collected photos of other airplanes, some from web sites, many that I took at Oshkosh, etc....I certainly looked at Scheme Designers web site for ideas, but in the end, couldn't see paying what they wanted to come up with something.

Where did I get my ideas? From EVERYONE! And I thank the community for putting their airplanes out there for us all to look at.

Paul
 
I Did My own

All during the many years I spent building our plane I worked with scaled 3-view drawings blown up from the builders manual. Each design detail I came up with that showed any appeal was colored in by my wife or I with several color combinations using colored pencils mostly. All of the designs and colored drawings were kept in a folder. Before I had the plane painted I made full size patterns for every element and taped them on the airplane. I found that some did not translate well from the scaled drawings to the actual airplane. The full sized patterns were redone, taped to the plane, evaluated and the process repeated until every element was just right. The full sized patterns and instructions (in drawing and text form) with precise dimensions were given to the painter as part of the painting contract. It was a very satisfying process that I wouldn't have missed for anything.

Bob Axsom
 
I think paint designs are very important for homebult aircarft. For one, a slick looking paint job I think can really enhance the personal pride associated with building... not only does it fly, but it looks beautiful! Airplanes are works of art in their own right.

Secondly, although it is not fair, when the average person sees our planes, they will make the initial judgements based on cosmetics. If we build planes that have professional looking paint jobs, I think this gives our aircraft, and thus our whole activity, more credibility to the general public (perhaps I'm overstating this, but if an RV were to be shown on the news, I'd rather see one with a snappy looking paint job, to impress the public).

Many of us are military aviation buffs, and some choose paint schemes reflecting this. I personally am thinking of replicating the gold and dark blue paint scheme of the "Golden Centennaires", a Canadian demonstration team preceeding the Snowbirds. The Golden Centennaires flew CT-114 Tutor's in 1967 (the Canadian Centennial year, the team was only formed for one year).

Check-out my website: www.c-func.com . Using MS Flight Sim, and some information I got through these forums, I was able to reproduce my paint scheme on a MSFS model, and take some screen captures which are on my website (including one parked at Ottawa airport, where I'm from; I found some detailed custom scenery for Ottawa). Anyone notice that it's actually a -7A model on those MSFS captures? I'm building a -9A but the -7A was the only RV model I could find that came with a paint kit. I just took the pictures so that the shorter wing-span was not too obvious ;)
 
oops... my last reply acccidentally got posted twice. Can this one please be deleted? (I know how to edit my posts, but cannot find how to delete them).