Most people associate the 1-23 with Steve McQueen's H model in the movie "The Thomas Crown Affair". However, there is another very important 1-23 you should know - Paul BIckle's "E" model which set 2 world attitude records (max altitude and altitude gained). Only 2 sailplanes have ever gone higher, and neither even came close to Bickle's attitude gained record. I discovered Paul's E model while exploring sailplanes at the Hollister airport in search of a paint scheme for my model. You can read about Paul's flight and see a picture of his plane here.
Once I saw Paul's plane and learned it's history I knew this was the 1-23 model I had to build. Paul's E model was/is a one off - it is even labeled "Experimental", and has some distinct features not seen on the other 1-23 models. They are:
1. Long wings like used on the later "H" models, but the small tail of the early models
2. A fairing that partially encloses the wheel. This plane originally only had a skid with no wheel, so the skid was expanded to become a fairing when the wheel was added.
3. Symmetric dive brakes that cantilever away from the wing surface (the H brakes are smaller under the wing and larger above the wing. Models before the E only had a brake on top of the wing).
4. Wing skids with square wing tips
I decided to include all these features in my build. Since I had already built a H style rudder, I called Mike and he graciously agreed to send me parts for a new rudder. Using the drawings on Tom's plans I cut a early style trailing edge from ply and modified the ribs to produce an early style rudder. This is a very easy mod for anyone wanting to build an A-E variant of the 1-23.
Here is the new trailing edge:
And the new rudder being laid out:
To make the skid/fairing I simply stacked pieces of ply to widen the existing skid slightly, and then added balsa to bring it out to the desired width. I then sanded and used filler to obtain the final shape. To avoid sanding the fuse skin I placed tape on the fuse during sanding. Here you can see the fairing taking shape. Notice the initial stair step as the fairing gets wider to the rear. This will be smoothed out by sanding and filler.
And here it is almost done:
The dive brakes and wing skids will be covered in a future post when we discuss building the wings.
-Mark
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