Probably not, at least in my experience. One trick is to design them with a overlength nose, but few kits do that, certainly none that are intended to be “scale”.
Using a heavy alloy doesn’t buy you much unless you have no room for ballast. without having to move your battery aft. However, putting the ballast as far forward as possible does require less of it. I haven’t seen them in a while, but you used to could buy extra-heavy brass prop nuts for exactly this reason. You could cast lead-shot epoxy mix into a spinner.
Even better is building a light tail section; with good planning and a bit of know-how it´s easy to scrap a lot of unecessary weight from a typical model plane airframe.
Bingo. Conventional wisdom is that every gram of weight you add to the tail will require many times that in the nose to balance. We do try to put the gear as forward as possible, but often you have no choice for things like aileron/flap servos which are mounted in the wing, often behind the CG.
Weight is not always a bad thing. It’s not uncommon to intentionally add many ounces of weight on a big day to get more momentum going and penetrate the wind better. “Lead sled”
This is an old thread, but I thought I’d add this since it answers the OP’s question and this thread has a pretty high ranking.
This site has exactly listed the densest metals:
Formatting has been lost in pasting but it’s readable. They are obviously not listed in order. On the left is the metal and to the right is their density (in case that wasn’t obvious. Based on this list, I would say brass would probably be the most practical. But what do I know?
Up until about 2 years ago, I had a Linotype and a companion Ludlow Typograph and used, er, screwed around with 'em almost every day. I got my blood tested yearly and never had any lead presence. Metallic lead is just not skin soluble, and you’d only have dangerous fumes if you ran the crucible insanely hot. The casting process would stop working properly long before you hit that spot.
Sorry for the hijack. In the spirit of the thread, I’ll note that my darts are 80% tungsten, 20% dunno. Find a set at a thrift store and there’s a cheap source of dense metal.
The most interesting new use for tungsten carbide IMO is in the production of high-end slides (bottlenecks) and picks for guitarists . http://www.wolframslides.com.
I have held in my hand the Wolfram slide owned by Martin Simpson, and it is unbelievably heavy … anybody who has seen him play doesn’t need to be told what a superb tone it delivers.
In case anyone’s curious about the name, wolframite is the main ore of tungsten, and the reason for the chemical symbol W.
I have a little cylinder of tungsten, about two inches across and two inches tall. It weighs about 4 lbs. Lead would only be just over 2 lbs. Aluminum feels like silver-colored plastic in comparison.
Except for tungsten, these are all considered precious metals, with prices in the hundreds of dollars per ounce. Tungsten is pretty close to the top but only costs about $20 per pound, in bulk. I have a cool little machined tungsten sphere about 1" in diameter that weighs over 5 ounces and cost me about $20.
I once visited the Long Now Foundation workshop in San Francisco where they had some of the components of their 10,000 year clock on display. There was a tungsten pendulum bob, about 4 inches in diameter, that weighed over 20 pounds. When I first tried to lift it, I thought it was bolted to the table.
I’ve touched the same bob that you have (I might have a slight obsession with tungsten). There are light and dense materials out there… but tungsten is the only one (given that it’s the only one I’ve handled significant quantities of) that feels abnormally heavy. Like, as you say, it’s been bolted to the table–or that you’ve been transported to a high-gravity planet. It has tremendous momentum as well.
After playing with a chunk of tungsten for a minute or so, it starts to feel normal. But afterward, everything else feels abnormally light, like it’s been replaced by a cheap plastic replica.
OMG want!!! But you can buy a perfectly useful guitar for the price of the that slide.
Engineering toolbox is a great site. It distils a huge amount of useful informations into a useful lump.
On the aviation side, one would note that depleted uranium and tungsten counterweights are commonly used in aircraft of all sizes. Typically on control surfaces to tune resonant modes away from the F word. (For any aeronautical engineer the F word is Flutter. ) famously the first few 747s built had a few hundred kilograms of depleted uranium in the engine pylons to help tune the wing twisting. In racing yacht design depleted uranium and tungsten were used in the keel bulb. For the same draft the centre of mass is lower than if lead is used, and the surface area, and thus drag, smaller. They were banned in an effort to keep costs down, although they remained in use on those boats built with them before the rule change.
(I might have a slight obsession with tungsten). There are light and dense materials out there… but tungsten is the only one (given that it’s the only one I’ve handled significant quantities of) that feels abnormally heavy. Like, as you say, it’s been bolted to the table–or that you’ve been transported to a high-gravity planet. It has tremendous momentum as well.