Creating flights of fancy

No detail is too small for Joe Dill's model airplanes

Treva Lind   /  Correspondent

Joe Dill first tinkered with home-built airplane models in 1949, when, as an 8-year-old, he couldn't afford 10-cent store kits. Instead, he got free wooden fruit boxes from the grocery store to carve fuselages and wings with his dad's help.

These days from the basement of his Five Mile area home, the 66-year-old Dill has long perfected creating replica flights of fancy. Using balsa wood, he builds airplanes from scratch starting with his own sketches, or he modifies older model kits.

Dill adds meticulous details to each craft: tiny control panels with knobs, the illusion of wing rivets using an ultra fine pen, little exhaust stacks and plastic pilots.

Some models are radio controlled, while others are control-line planes flown on a wire. Dill flies some of them with two area model airplane clubs, but both he and his wife Sheila admit that Dill mainly prefers making the planes.

"It's one of those things where you think you're getting better but then you still crash – quite often," says Dill.

His hobby room displays about 50 airplanes, hung from the ceiling or walls.

"Most of them on the ceiling are control-line models I built in the 1960s and 70s," he says. The control-line planes, which have motors, are flown in a circle on about a 60- to 70-foot braided stainless steel wire.

His airplanes range in style from different eras. A Navy World War II Corsair was modified from a kit, and Dill added such details as guns, an air intake system and rivets.

Dill built a white Ranger 3 in 1970 completely from scratch. "I took the old end of newsprint and drew up the plans and built it myself out of balsa wood. It's a challenge just to sit down and draw it up."

He competed from 1963 to 1970 with control line planes and even flew one in the national model aviation competition in 1968. He also honed some of his skills at Boeing for five years in the 1960s when he was in charge of building airplane models based on the company's real 747 and SST airplanes. The smaller replicas were then tested for flight in a wind tunnel.

"They were small models about the same size as the ones here to test functions – lift, drag and turns," he says. "When we were done testing the models, the pilots knew how well the real planes would fly, the models were that accurate."

Dill, who primarily worked in advertising, retired early at age 56. That gave him more time for hobbies, including restoring a 1954 Chevy.

To build his planes, Dill cuts parts out of balsa wood as well as light plywood. He uses a jigsaw, tools and lots of sandpaper. Covering a plane involves using monocoat, a plastic film, or a method of aircraft dope and tissue.

One model under construction with an 8-foot wing span, is a 1937 Super Buccaneer. "It took me all winter to work on this." he says.

Although he sold off about half of his old model kit collection in recent years, Dill still has more than 200 left and plenty of projects remaining.

"The details I get into, the pilot and instrument panel, usually come with kits. I make copies of the instrument panel, enlarge them, reduce them back down and then add little details for instruments, like straight pins to simulate switches," Dill says.

"To me, when a model is sitting on the field and you're flying it, it should have a pilot and details. I enjoy the detail work."

For an audio slideshow chronicling Joe Dill's passion for model airplanes, go to spokesmanreview.com/blogs/video