I was currious if it was at all possible to purchase just the plans of your road kill series planes. I like the kits and would like to try and build one from scratch.

From : Don Stackhouse

Unfortunately, no, for a couple of reasons.

1. We are in the kit business. The amount of labor and expense required to develop a new design (typically a couple hundred hours or more just for the engineering and prototype development work alone) could not be justified by the minimal profits from plans sales. If we don't make enough profit, we can't make ends meet (a seriously difficult job with kits sales as it is, and plans sales would actually make that situation worse). If we can't make ends meet, we have to stop trying to do what we love, and go out and get "regular" jobs. We lose, and you lose too, since we would not have time left to develop cool new airplane designs, or to maintain our website. We've been in that situation before, and it's why we quit so we could try to make it full time working in this business.

2. Our Roadkill Series models are designed to be laser-cut kits. They do not lend themselves well to trying to scratch-build. I have built a number of the prototypes from scratch where for one reason or another we decided not to wait for some laser-cut prototypes, and trust me, it's not something you want to do if you have an alternative. In terms of material costs it doesn't save much (if any) money if you're buying the materials retail. More importantly, the parts are quite intricate, and designed to interlock precisely for correct alignment, which makes them extremely difficult to cut out by hand.

Also, laser-cutting is essentially a zero-cutting-force process. The mechanical forces required to cut the parts out by hand can warp parts, or weaken some of the more critical areas of some parts, such as control linkage components. Other parts are so small and delicate (such as the Jenny's radiator cap) that they defy cutting out by hand.

In any case, assuming you have patterns of the parts to work from (we also don't give those out, it would be commercially equivalent to cutting our own throats), cutting out a full set of parts for even a simple Roadkill Series model (such as most of the single-engine monoplanes) is typically about a 3-5 day job (that's assuming 8-10 hour days), and the work is extremely tedious and time consuming. You can expect to have some very sore fingers and hands by the time you're done, and probably a case of eyestrain as well. I don't even want to think about what it would take to do something like the B-17 that way! Considering that the basic airframe assembly work only takes a couple of hours or so once you have the parts, trying to cut them out by hand is false economy. You're really much better off just buying the kit.

Don Stackhouse
DJ Aerotech