Li’L Wizard

I am currently building a vintage Carl Goldberg ‘Li’l Wizard’ control line model to teach my son how to fly control line!

This plane is a Cox .049 powered profile trainer with a 21″ solid sheet wingspan and it can fly on 52′ control lines.

Back on August 29, 1997, I paid $22.50 for this kit (yes, I still have the original receipt!) in hopes of teaching my then 7 and 9 year old boys how to fly control line. Neither of them had any interest. And so the kit sat in the box, un-built…for 16 years! Then, one day early this summer, my younger son, now 23, caught a bit of my enthusiasm for flying airplanes and declared that he might like to learn how to fly control line. That was all the motivation I needed! The goal then became how to complete the plane quickly enough so that we could have at least one flying session with it before the snow started to fly. Even though this is a simple kit with a fairly short build time, the combination of not enough time in the day to work on models coupled with my desire to make this plane look reasonably respectable and not just thrown together have conspired to chew up the remainder of the summer without it being completed yet.

The Li’L Wizard is now fully built and ready for the paint booth. It is shown here with 2 coats of clear dope applied over 2 coats of sanding sealer. I will be painting it in a paint scheme similar to what you see on the model box cover in the below photos. The hobby shop did not have red dope so I defaulted to powder blue, which they did have. It will now receive a base coat of white dope followed by a blue top coat. That will then be topped off with two coats of clear gloss dope.

Once out of the paint booth, the engine, wheels, and control line hardware will be added and then it will be off to the flying circle!