Ben Shereshaw remembered
Ben Shereshaw was well-rounded in nearly all aspects of model aviation as it existed during his early life, as were many early modelers. That’s in stark contrast with today, when most of us aren’t capable of staying current with even half of the available modeling disciplines.
Ben started with rubber-powered models as a teenager during the early 1920s. Gasoline engines were rare at that time. It wasn’t until the 1930s that he acquired his first engine: a Loutrel. The Loutrel was a forerunner of the infamous GHQ engine, but unlike the poorly machined GHQ, the Loutrel was a decent-running engine capable of successfully powering a model.
Using the Loutrel, Ben designed and flew a model named the Speedster. It was a pleasant-looking, scale-like, high-wing monoplane. According to Ben’s official AMA biography, the Speedster was the first gas model to be offered as a kit in the U.S.
The Great Depression made spending money scarce during the 1930s. However, the emerging interest in general aviation, along with Lindbergh’s famous transcontinental flight, sparked an interest in model building in nearly every young man in America, and business in kits, engines, and modeling supplies flourished.
Ben designed models and wrote construction articles for magazines. He sold designs to kit makers such as Berkeley and Scientific. As did Ray Arden, Ben saw a need for smaller, lighter, more powerful engines. He acquired some machine equipment and began building engines in his home. His first commercially produced engine was his Bantam 16. After a degree of success with the 16, Ben produced the Bantam 19, which was first offered circa 1939.
The Bantam 19 engine is probably Ben’s most notable product. It was good-looking, powerful, and lightweight. It dominated the small-class competition until Arden’s 19-size engine came along to claim those honors. The Bantam used rear rotary-valve induction, which was relatively new to model engines at the time.
Miniature Motors Company of New Jersey produced the Bantam 19, replacing Ben’s home shop. He worked out a deal with Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA), which made the expensive casting dies and let Ben pay for them from sales profits. Bantam cases were cast from either aluminum or magnesium. With a stake in the engines, ALCOA also provided valuable advertising.
Small engines, such as the Bantam and others, prompted the Champion Spark Plug Company to produce the V-3 spark plug, a smaller, short-reach version of the 1/4-inch V-2 plug. I'm not sure which came first, but the Bantam 19 could well have been the basis for selecting .20 as the upper limit for Class A competition. There were so many Bantam 19s produced that it's not hard to find one for your OT airplane or your engine collection. The Bantam 14, however, is relatively rare.
Ben's airplane designs are "sleepers" in today's competition. They are aerodynamically clean, but their shapely, rounded fuselages are often overlooked in favor of more easily built slab-sided designs.
The Scientific Mercury and the Commodore are fairly common at OT contests. A few years back, the Cumulus and Nimbus were the hot combination often flown by the Texans in OT RC competition. I've seen Ben's RC-1 design flown a few times, but because it is a twin-boom model, it's more complicated to build and transport. Chet Lanzo's earlier RC-1 design of the same name is of conventional construction and is flown quite often in competition. Both RC-1s were designed for radio control.
Ben's Cavalier was kitted by Berkeley in several sizes and versions. Two members of my SAM (Society of Antique Modelers) chapter are building the Cavalier Custom Twin as a joint project. It's a large, seldom-seen undertaking. It can be built with either single or twin engines, single or twin rudders, or both. This one will be powered alternately by either a Forster 99 or an O.K. twin. It's bound to attract attention at the flying field.
Ben was an engineer and innovator. Although Ray Arden is generally credited with inventing the glow plug, Ben had a hand in its development, as was described in this column in the December 2011 issue.
I was privileged to meet Ben Shereshaw at his induction into the SAM Hall of Fame in 1990. Such meetings are sometimes just a quick handshake and congratulations, but on that occasion I bore greetings from an old friend of Ben's with whom I happened to work. Ben hadn't seen or heard from the man in years. Those meetings with modeling pioneers are part of the fun at OT events.
Ben Shereshaw died in May 2009.
Trailer Hitches
Trailer hitches, whether or not you tow a trailer, can be useful for modeling purposes. Free Flighters often use the square hitch sockets for a chase-bike mount. Those who fly rubber power can use that socket to set up a winding stooge. A chunk of steel isn't necessary; use a 2 x 2-inch length of hardwood drilled for the lock pin as a start. Designing the rest of the stooge should be easy for a scratch builder.
Other uses and tips:
- Use the mount as a solid base for an engine test stand. To avoid sending greasy exhaust into the back of your vehicle, the stand should rotate 180° to keep propeller blast at right angles to the vehicle, with the exhaust pointed toward the rear. Also take care not to direct exhaust into a neighbor’s car.
- Trailer electrical outlets safely carry much more current than a cigarette-lighter socket for heavy battery charging. Utility trailer renters usually rig their lighting plugs with something incompatible with your socket, but they can rent you a conversion plug or cut into your wiring with clip-on connectors.
- I bought a spare Bargeman male plug and wired a smaller four-pin trailer connector into it. I later added a pair of Powerpole connectors to the same plug for field charger use.
Radio Frequency Interference
Radio frequency interference isn't limited to radios; it also affects other electronic gadgets. I had a problem with tachometers being affected by a running spark-ignition engine. It bugged me for months until I slowly figured out the "rules."
When I started an engine on the test stand, then switched on a tachometer, the screen wouldn't light up. If I moved away from the engine, the tachometer still didn't work. I would go into my shop and clean the battery connections before the tachometer would light up and display the correct 3,600 rpm under the shop lights.
Back outside by the running engine, it was a no-go again. The problem was repeatable, using two brands of tachometers. I resorted to checking the tachometer in the shop and leaving it on while moving outside and starting the engine. That worked, and the tachometer would read correctly.
After failing to switch on next to a running engine, why did I have to clean the battery connections before the tachometer would switch on again? The first tachometer has a memory, but no capacitor or small button battery. That meant the main battery must be supplying trickle power to retain the memory, even with the display switched off.
Cleaning the battery terminals hadn't been the trick; disconnecting the batteries (or the main switch) allowed the tachometers to come back to life. Tachometer number two doesn't feature a retained memory. I can only guess that it probably uses the same circuitry chip as the first tachometer.
Later, testing on others' aircraft at the flying field revealed the problem to be peculiar to my clip-on ignition set. It uses a strong coil and no resistor in the high-tension lead. Because free-flight (FF) modelers don't need the high-tension resistor, it seems more likely they'd see this problem than would RC fliers. I'm curious to hear from anyone who has encountered this odd problem.
Lost Model Alarm
Did you catch the review on page 15 of the November 2011 Model Aviation? Plugged into an unused RC receiver channel, this gadget emits a beeping sound to help locate your model should it go down in bushes, cornfields, trees, or any place where you can get reasonably close but can't quite see it. It's lightweight at 3.5 grams and inexpensive at $7.99.
I received test samples of both models—LMA-A (Lost Model Alarm–Actively Triggered) and LMA-P (Lost Model Alarm–Passively Triggered)—and found they weighed and operated as specified. But the sound volume was less than expected; several of us with older ears had to be much closer than the 300 feet noted by the Model Aviation reviewer, or even the 50 meters (164 feet) advertised range.
I discovered another benefit of the LMA-P unit. It serves as a good reminder to turn off your receiver should you forget to do so after flying. It beeps whenever no active signal is received from the transmitter for 1 minute. The LMA-A unit does this also, but only if it's plugged into a non-failsafe channel and only after the transmitter is turned off.
I suggested to the provider that because FF modelers are more likely to need this unit, he might consider a self-powered (button-battery) version that could be wired to a standard dethermalizer timer. He's considering it.
Sources
- Lost Model Alarm
[email protected] www.lostmodelalarm.com
- Ben Shereshaw's biography
www.modelaircraft.org/files/Shereshaw-Ben.pdf
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
