Building a working plane from model airplane plans can be an exciting and rewarding hobby, but it can also be a lot of work. Model airplane kits can be hard enough. They often have wings built entirely of thin, balsa wood ribs coated in a plastic outer wrap, which are easy to break and difficult to assemble. But building a model airplane from scratch is just that much harder. A good buddy of mine says that you should not even pick up model airplane plans unless you really are a true fanatic. And he should know - he has been building model airplanes for a good fifteen years.
Before you get your first model airplane plan, you will need to set up your workspace. You will need a variety of equipment. In addition to the standard model airplane glue, X-acto knife, paints, and other supplies that you will no doubt be familiar with, you will need a variety of small saws and jewelers tools, such as files. The precise equipment that you need to build your model airplane plans will depend on the aircraft that you will be making. A good rule of thumb is that the smaller the airplane, the harder that it is to build. In addition, certain types of model airplane plans are harder to put together than others. Single wing models are the easiest, with biplanes and triplanes being progressively harder.
Above all, building model airplanes requires patience. When I got my first model airplane kit, I was no more than ten years old. At that point, I thought it was the neatest thing in the world, but I just did not have it in me to build it by myself. By the time my dad stepped in to help me, I had almost ruined the kit trying to figure it out myself. I did not even have the patience to look at the model airplane plans until my dad made me do just that. There was a lesson in all of that for me that I did not soon forget. When I got my own son his first model airplane kit, I remembered what it was like trying to settle down and spend the hours required to assemble mine. You can bet that I was right there with him, helping him read the model airplane plans and build the plane, piece by piece without skipping any steps.