Owen Dwire's
Slo Poke

Owen sent me this picture of his Great Planes Slo Poke. He's named this beauty "Fly Me!" Here's what Owen had to say....

If you are not familiar with this airplane, it is the Slo Poke from Great Planes Models. I built the airplane to try out an OS FS-26 my wife gave me for my B-day. This is my first experience with a 4-stroke engine so I thought the Slo Poke would be a good platform to do a little experimenting with it. My experiences with the engine thus far are pretty good. I hope to be able to get it to idle a little better as I get a few more flights on it.

This was the first Great Planes airplane that I have built. I was not too impressed with the quality of the wood included in the kit nor was the accuracy of some of the die cut pieces up to my specifications. This necessitated substituting a number of pieces of wood from other sources. I also changed out some of the hardware included in the kit. This was more out of personal choice rather than a dissatisfaction with the kit's hardware. I used pull-pull Kevlar cables for the rudder and a split control rod for the elevator. I also used an after market tail wheel bracket rather than attach the wire for the tail wheel directly to the rudder as called for in the plans. I did this because our field has a tendency to get a little rough at times and I did not want to have to continually repair the rudder. My version of the Slo Poke came out slightly tail heavy (probably due to the tail wheel bracket) and due to the short nose I ended up adding 2 ounces of weight to the nose.

Cheers,
Owen