Advantages of Foam Material

Foamy Advantages

Foam material is relatively new to model airplane hobby industry, but it has revolutionized the industry quite dramatically in recent years.

The foam materials for model airplane construction have proven their values both in the store and in the field because of certain advantages these materials have over the conventional one.

In Model-Aircrafts.com some of these reletively distinctive advantages of foam material are outlined as follow:

Thirteen Benefits of Using Foam Material

[1] Foam material is usually inexpensive and widely available from most building supply or RC hobby stores. Therefore you don’t have to break the bank for building your own custom-designed model airplanes with foam materials.

[2] In general most foam materials that are suitable for building foamy model airplanes will have no troubles for being used as a clever combination with other conventional materials such as the balsa sheets or sticks, fiberglass etc.

[3] Physically it is waterproof, lightweight, strong and somehow or very flexible. Several advantages come out from these physical characteristics of foam material being that model airplanes made of foamy are in general easy to maintain, durable, tough and virtually crash-proof.

[4] Easy for handling, transporting and storage as implied by its physical characteristics (i.e. light weight etc.).

[5] Without having to concern about grain direction and splitting like with balsa wood.

[6] Foam material is very consistent and each sheet or block is almost indistinguishable to every other piece.

Therefore, you don’t have to worry about material selection or to spend hours at the hobby stores looking for suitable matching/identical pieces for your model airplane building project.

[7] It is easy to work with mainly as a result of its physical characteristics.

Hence the use of suitable foam materials make possible for the speed and accuracy of model airplane construction, even if it is for building the components of irregular shape such as the airfoils.

[8] Most foam materials can often be cut and shaped manually using inexpensive hand tools or hot-wire cutter into a very realistic looking foam component of model airplanes.

[9] Bulky foam blocks (i.e. such as that of white polystyrene foam) are suitable for building large-scale model airplanes and their components (e.g. foam-core wings, fuselages etc.) economically.

[10] Foam sheet material of different thicknesses (e.g. 1 mm, 2 mm, 3 mm or 5 mm thick Depron foam sheet) are suitable for building composite components such as the foam-veneered wings (e.g. wings of balsa rib construction with foam sheet as the skins) of model airplanes.

[11] Coloured foams (i.e. in colours of white, pink, gray, blue, red etc.) provide colourful appearance to model airplanes without the need of painting.

[12] Foam material is normally safe from being in contact with standard glow engine fuels, although it will reacts almost instantaneously with raw gasoline.

[13] As most of the foam materials suitable for building model airplanes are widely available in the market, there are a lot of information and resources available online for novices who wish to educate themselves first before getting into using different types of foam materials for own model building projects.