The original design from Final Fantasy 7 as released by Square Soft (at the time), fun fact did you know the Tiny Bronco was going to be called "Sister Ray" which because the cannon name!
The wing sets out the shape for everything so I started there scaling the sizes down (best guess in some areas) and made a template to use.
Now the primary wing has its shape I can begin building on it.
The main fuselage body went through a few versions to get an acceptable shape that was also as light as possible.
With the fuselage in place, tail booms and horizontal stab in place its beginning to look like the Bronco we all know and love.
Few more sanding tweaks and adding the rest of the tail area in.
Next to keep things as light as possible I sanded 8mm square balsa lengths round so I could control the weight as much as possible.
With the underwing spars in place I could continue adding 1mm carbon fibre rod to re-enforce the structure and stiffen the frame otherwise it will flex in flight given the thickness involved here!
Last weight check in before we get to painting. Not bad at 3.46 grams!
In order to save weight I decided that while re-enforcing the whole structure with thinned epoxy resin I could colour dye it with red acrylic paint toned to the correct red required. This means the bulk becomes pre-painted so I only need do trim painting after.
The epoxy resin had a full 24h to fully cure and harden before I wet sanded it down ... carefully.
Next its the blue accent trim and printing our decals... no way I'm hand painting the Tiny Bronco words at this scale lol
Painting and such all done we now sit at 5.4 grams.. for the entire frame!
Final touches as it looked FAR to clean!
So I used black pen to add trim lines around the cockpit and then used thinned ink brushed in along the wing leading edges and places for a bit of weathering effect. Nothing over the top but enough to make it look used.
Now it's time for electronics and I have to begin with the FPV camera as the wiring runs through the cockpit and later be covered by the control board.
To save weight I put the Snapper6 frame on a diet and trimmed off just over 2 grams.
I don't want the quad frame to stand out and given the bright red nature of the Tiny Bronco all I had to do was colour it all black. The red over powers the black and draws the eye away from the frame.
From the bottom its a bit of a different story, at this scale I can only do so much to hide components lol
So final weigh in Without lipo stands at 27.17 grams for the entire model!
Super happy with that result and is 5 grams below my maximum target where I worried if it'd fly or not. So now I should get a little more power.
Although fragile as hell the Tiny Bronco cannot be without the propellers on the end of the wings. These just totally complete the look :D
Over a decade in the making but I'm mega happy with this!
