With the Thermal Racer – TR035 rc sailplane I wanted to power it with something with enough kick, but keep weight and cost down.

Also I wanted something different, like the Yanks do with their mussle cars – you know, they get a big block engine pre assembled and simply plonk it in

So first thing is to cut out a monster hole in the nose and an area for my battery casing.

I mounted the outrunner (I use outrunners as they stay much cooler as the whole thing spins) to a rubber/foam case which is then slotted into the area I cut out. The area for this case/battery bit is a little smaller for a very tight fit. This means beleive it or not I don’t have to glue anything

The whole rig – even with a four cell battery can sustain vertical flight without moving. The reason for this is give – something has to give when you land hard, and I used to break shafts, mounts and even damage my lipos. So I came up with this – the lipo is in a protective bed, even with a hard hit on the nose it does not damage anything. It acts like a bumper of a car.

The actual spinner is made up of several different components as I could not find a folding prop with a large spinner. For some reason even the big sailplanes have small spinners

I wanted a smooth scale look – not a pimple on the end of a nose sort of look.

I used a DuBro spinner and cut out parts for the folding prop, used shafts from another, blades from another and modified another central piece.