How to Modify, Scale, and Reformat FT Plans

Flite Test puts out some amazing plans that can keep scratch builders busy for years. I’ve loved printing out the plans, taping them up, cutting out the foam and putting together the whole thing. In fact, it’s about as much fun to me as actually going out and flying the end result.

But sometimes the process of cutting out and taping together the plans becomes more frustrating than fun. In this article and the video, I try to bring together the tips and techniques that I’ve learned that have helped me put together these plans faster and easier. At the end, I also cover how the same techniques can be used to modify or scale any of the Flite Test plans to whatever size you like or change them in basically any way you like. This is really handy whether you want to scale an FT design up or down, or if you prefer printing in a large format specifically for laying on Dollar Tree Foam Board sheets.

I recommend watching the video over on YouTube itself, in at least 720p, and as full screen as possible, as I didn't anticipate how faint the lines for the plans would appear.

My first build was the FT Flyer. I printed out the full-sized plans using the poster format in Adobe Reader. There were some frustrating parts in the cutting and taping, but the Flyer was simple enough that it wasn’t too big a deal to me, and I pressed on. But when I decided to build the FT Spitfire, the larger size and the increased complexity meant that all the frustrating parts would be multiplied.

Looking like a frustating time of cutting and taping

I decided to see what I could do to make things easier for myself and remembered Josh Bixler saying at some point that he put together his plans in Corel, a vector graphics editing software package. Usually, if you make something with a vector graphics editor, it can be easily edited with another vector graphics editor. I downloaded Inkscape, a free vector graphics editor, and started messing around with the FT Spitfire plans.

I found that I could reformat, scale, and otherwise modify the plans pretty much in any way I wanted. So instead of being restricted to the plans as provided, I could pack all the parts in much more densely, saving on paper, taping, and hopefully avoiding all the annoying cuts. And it worked well for many of the small pieces, that would fit on one or two pages. But with the larger pieces, Adobe was still adding extra margin and making it impossible to use the cut lines I wanted, and it was impossible to change the poster printing settings.

At that point, I discovered Mindcad Tiler, a PDF tiling program that allows great control over the printing large PDF files in a tiled poster format. It is Mac-only as far as I’m aware, and $4.99 on the App Store, but well worth it. The results are almost exactly the same as from Adobe reader, except that you get to choose the orientation of the layout, and exactly how many sheets you want it to print over.

Much better results using Inkscape and Mindcad Tiler together

Between Inkscape and Mindcad Tiler, I was able to reduce the number of 8.5x11 sheets I had to print by about half (from 32 to around 16), put the cut lines in much more convenient places, and really brought down the time and frustration involved in putting together the plans, so I could get on to cutting foam and building the plane.

The video tutorial is long and involved, but steps through the entire process of bringing the FT Mini Scout from 16 sheets (if printed from the standard plans) to 5 sheets, with only 3 pieces going across more than one sheet, and only 1 cut through each of them. The techniques from that process can be applied to any Flite Test plan, and really any plan that was put together using vector graphics software. The video also briefly covers how you can use Inkscape to scale any design up or down. Want an 80% FT Spitfire? Or a 200% FT Scout? Use Inkscape to easily scale the design and then lay it out in whatever format you like. Want to compact as much as possible into a layout for putting directly on a sheet of foam board? Use Inkscape to reformat the plans on a new PDF layout, save the file on a thumb drive, and bring it to Kinko’s (and lighten the load on nerdnic’s plate!).

Original FT Mini Scout plans printed out

Modifying and condensing the plans in Inkscape

The simple and neat end result

I hope this is helpful, please feel free to ask questions, make comments or corrections, or add your tips about what makes scratch builds easier for you.

I do want to give a shout out to nerdnic, first for being a generally awesome example of a community member contributing generally awesome stuff, but also for the idea of light jazzy music as the background to a tutorial like this, I think it’s so much better than just hearing my voice drone on for an hour.