*** Andy Steere's P-47 ***

My brother-in-law, Randy Loesch, is an excellent R/C Airplane builder. Having several planes under his belt, he set out to build a Top Flite 1/8th scale P-47 Thunderbolt. Typical of Randy's talent, the aircraft was built strong and very light. Wanting a more scale finish than monokote, he decided that painting was the way to go. A friend of his, Jim Cooper, also an accomplished builder and truely an artist, was to do the honors of painting it. Jim had finished painting the fiberglass cowl, assembled and painted the cockpit kit and pilot, and hand-made a scale-like 4-blade propeller for static display. Unfortunately, Jim found a job several states away and was going to be unable to finish the model. Randy didn't really want to finish it himself, so he sold the plane to me.

The following pages describe various stages of building/finishing and flying. The most recent entries are at the top. To see the progress from beginning to end, start at the bottom of this page.