One of my project (which I really should get and finish
) is to build a prop driven F-86, an F-86D to be exact. The idea came about after reading about the Rolls Royce Crecy two-stroke engine, one of the theoretical combustion engineers there had reworked the design into a 16 cylinder 'X' configuration of about 7 litres and putting out 2500 hp. The engine would have had a Griffon two-stage supercharger attached to the front (which had about the same diameter as the engine block) and the exhaust
was channeled back into an exhaust turbine. The contraption looked very much like a jet turbine engine in appearance. The chapter then went on to explain by juggling the numbers the engineer had come up with and making everything larger, they could have got a 24 cylinder 'X' configuration which kicked out about 8000 hp (in theory that is).
My idea was to go with this engine so I started looking around for an airframe that could handle 8000 hp. The book on the Crecy (and Mustang) from Rolls Royce, explains that a pound of thrust is about 1 hp, so that narrowed the search to what airframe to look for. Now the F-86D just happens to fall in this catagory, plus it has a nose that looks like a spinner and it didn't take much to come up with a design. The engine would be where the real engine would be and using a Rolls Royce designed drive-shaft (designed for their mid-engined FTB project), powering a prop on the front wouldn't be a problem I think. Prop ground clearance would easily be accommodated by using the FJ-4 Fury u/c (there's at least 12" of clearance when I measure it with my scale rule). I used a Wyvern prop and after cutting off the radome nose, I only had to sand the fuselage back about 1mm before the spinner and fuselage diameters matched.
Anyway, some pics of it.