Slow Stick Floats - Modifications, Builds, Components and much more.

Tools and Materials

Material
I make my floats out of the inexpensive white sheet insulation (EPS -expanded polystyrene insulation) that you will find at virtually all material supply places and lumber companies. I buy mine at Chase Pitkins a chain in the NE similar to Lowes and Home Depot. A 2’ x 8’ x 2” sheet which is big enough to make about 10pairs of floats cost less than $5. Some places only have it in the 1.5” thickness but that will also work just as well. Occasionally your suppler will have a broken sheet that will be adequate for your needs that they will sell for a few dollars. The rest of the material you need you should be able to find at your LHS or craft supply store.

Cutting The Foam– You don’t need fancy hot wire cutting equipment to make floats!
I use a Scroll Saw(we use to call them jig saws) to cut the foam. A small band saw also would work very well. You could even do a reasonable job using a hand held coping saw. Of course you could also cut the foam using a hot wire.

Float Pattern
The float pattern I use is based on a RCM article written by Chuck Cunningham. You can find a copy of that article here The dimensions are based on the length of the float which is in turn is determined by the length of the model. Generally the floats should be about 75 – 80% of the fuselage length. For the Slow Stick this worked out to be 25” so that’s how long I made my first set of floats. Later I changed it to 24” because it was easier to simply cut out the starting blanks across the 2’ width of the sheets. My pattern for these floats is shown below. For other size planes you can proportionally change the dimensions based on the float length. In any event don’t worry about getting the dimensions exactly right as anything close should work.

Float Width
For lighter planes Cunningham suggested a 2” width but for the Slow Stick I found a slightly wider width worked better. Perhaps the lighter and slower parkflyer types benefit from a slightly wider and shorter float. With the method I am using you can make wide floats even though you’re starting with foam that is only 1.5” or 2” thick.

Float Shape
The floats I will be making a have a pentagon shaped cross-section. They have a shallow “V” for the bottom, sloped sides and a flat top. It’s referred to as the Carl Goldberg shape in this article from which I got my inspiration for this design.

Making the Floats
The first step in making the floats is to cut out starting blanks that are about 2.5” wide by 24” long. Since these are rough cut blanks you can cut them out with most anything.(utility knife, hand saw, hot wire, scroll or band saw) You will need 4 blanks for each set of floats.

Cutting the Pattern
Make a template of the float pattern on a piece of thin cardboard. Pin it to the side of a foam blank and trace around it with a Sharpie type marker. Now using the saw carefully cut out the float. Do this with each of the 4 blanks. Because the foam is very easy to cut you will find you can do a very good job of cutting out these floats.