Model Dirigible/Propeller Planes

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>>1063599
RC airships are a thing.

For a dirigible you might see if guillows or someone else makes a balsa and paper kit. I have one tucked away somewhere. Balsa kits are a bit of a lost art, really only popular among old fashioned rc aircraft fans. They are fun as hell though, and building a plane or zep off a plan with only balsa wood and doped tissue paper is a neat experience.

>>1063606
Thank you, I neglected to mention that I was talking about functional models, and not just something that looks nice

>>1063599
Cheapo drones ripped to bits and their controller to make the motors + directional control, then grog out completely with balsa and paper as >>1063608 suggested.
For helium though, you'd need to contain it in bladders inside and you're also going to have to figure out a weight to lift ratio of the vessel + electronics = how big the bastard will end up. Pretty much an inside-use only type craft though as a good wind will send it to parts unknown!

Planes are generally best bought as kits, plenty of RC plane clubs out there (most seem to be really friendly people too) and get a cheap electronic one to learn on before lashing out on something a bit more complicated and expensive. Because you will crash.

>>1063615
You are going to have a hell of a time building a rigid airship that is light enough to fly yet strong enough to not fall apart yet small enough to fit in your car for wherever you want to fly it. Might not even be doable with balsa for all I know. You get about a kilo of lift for each cubic meter of helium. Consider an oil drum is about 200 liters, and there are a thousand liters in a cubic meter, to give you an idea of that.

>>1063639
Guess one way he could do it would be to break the airframe down into 3-4 sections and clip it together.
Balsa is pretty good at supporting its own weight + a little more, though to get the nice curves and stuff you'd need to heat/steam-bend it across some kind of jig. If its roughly about 1kg per 1cubic m, then it's probably going to be around 2-3 50L bin liner sized bladders. From memory Helium will wiff through just about anything, so the bin liner might be out for being too porous, something like industrial plastic used for concreting and sealed up or heavy duty plastic bags with a valve would keep it in longer.

>>1063639
A 10-foot (3-meter) model of R101 would produce about 250 grams of lift. For argument's sake, let's say you only want 100 grams of that to be structure, saving the rest for batteries, motors and radio gear. A 3-foot (~1 meter) stick of 3/32" balsa weighs about one gram, so you're looking about 100 yards(/meters) of 3/32" balsa stick. Somehow I think a football field's length of balsa is enough to build a ten-foot airship frame.