RADIO CONTROL SLOPE SOARING 2003/04

118 MODEL AVIATION
SPRING SLOPE EVENTS: For you Slopin’ Safari types, two
spring Slope Soaring events have been announced at the time of this
writing, and you may want to plan a late-spring trip around one or
both of them. These major events are held at inland sites, reminding
us that the ocean is not the only place to fly Slope.
The 2003 Midwest Slope Challenge (MWSC) runs May 15-18 at
Wilson Lake in Lucas, Kansas. Wilson is a reservoir featuring a 100-
mile shoreline with many hills and few trees, making one or another
site flyable in many wind directions. This will be the 10th-anniversary
edition of the longest-running Slope Race series in the country, this
Dave Garwood, 5 Birch Ln., Scotia NY 12302; E-mail: [email protected]
RADIO CONTROL SLOPE SOARING
Dave Sanders flies a big Wade Kloos EPP (expanded polypropylene)-
foam Mustang at the 2001 Southern California PSS Festival.
Rich Loud’s DAW foaMe-109 leads Ken Hawkins’ foaMe-163 during
Foamie Warbird Racing practice at Midwest Slope Challenge 2001.
Joe Chovan flies Brian Laird molded Zero; Dave Garwood flies Robert
Cavazos molded Airacobra over Wilson Lake. Wayne Rigby photo.
A pair of ODR (One-Design Racing)-class airplanes in the far turn
at Midwest Slope Challenge 2001. Photo by Rich Loud.
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120 MODEL AVIATION
year expanding to four sanctioned days and
scheduled to include three classes of racing
and a Foamie Combat match.
The MWSC Web site is
www.alltel.net/~mwsc. The contact person is
Contest Director (CD) Loren Blinde, who
can be contacted at [email protected]. See
the R/C Soaring Digest Web site for a report
on MWSC 2002 at www.b2streamlines.com/
MWSC2002.pdf.
The 2003 Southern California PSS
(Power Scale Soaring) Festival is set for
May 24-25 at Cajon Summit, California.
This is the place to see and be seen if you’re
into high-level craftsmanship and extreme
flying of PSS warbirds and slope jets. This
megasite, overlooking Cajon Pass in the San
Bernardino National Forest, gets its daily
blast of wind from the high desert to the east
of the site. As the desert heats up, it pulls
wind through the pass and right up the
slope. The wind turns on here by noon
almost every day.
The Cajon Summit event Web site is
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/
slope_scale. The contact person is CD Brian
Laird, who can be contacted at
[email protected]. The R/C
Soaring Digest Web site has a report on
Cajon 2002 at www.b2streamlines.com/
CajonPSS.pdf.
Slope Scale Models: I first saw a Slope
These are some of the PSS airplanes and some of the people on the main hill at the
Southern California PSS Festival in 2000. Bring your sunscreen lotion!
At the 2000 Southern California PSS
Festival, Brian Laird flies a Lockheed P-80
Shooting Star he built and finished.
A Message to All AMA Members
Help in maintaining and acquiring flying sites–it’s
the heartbeat of aeromodeling.
The Flying Site Assistance Program consists of
volunteers who serve as the eyes and ears of the
Academy of Model Aeronautics and its members.
These volunteers are tasked with being the best
informed members in their local areas with
regard to any public or private activity that could
impact an existing or future flying site.
They accomplish this by reading the newspaper,
watching television, listening to the radio, etc.
The accumulation, dissemination, and
distribution of such information could prove
vitally important in maintaining an AMA
Chartered Club in any given area.
If you, as an AMA member, would be interested
in volunteering for such an important and
challenging endeavor, please contact:
Districts I-VI
Joe Beshar
198 Merritt Drive
Oradell NJ 07649
Phone: (201) 261-1281
Fax: (201) 261-0223
[email protected]
Districts VII-XI
Wes De Cou
202 W. Desert Flower Lane
Phoenix AZ 85045
Phone: (480) 460-9466
Fax: (480) 460-9434
[email protected]
04sig4.QXD 1.24.03 10:16 am Page 120
Scale A6M5 Zero flown at the World
Soaring Jamboree in 1994, and when I got
home I decided that I had to have one. I
mentioned in the February column that I
generally write about airplanes that I have
hands-on experience with, and if you’ll
indulge me for a few paragraphs I’ll tell you
about my love affair with Slope Scale
airplanes.
They’re specialized designs, optimized
for speedy flight performance first and good
looks second. Even though I don’t live in
Gliderland (California), I find them exciting
enough to have built seven, written kit
reviews for three, and I presently have four
ready to fly with receivers mounted and two
kits still in their boxes. Kits in boxes are
what dreams are made of.
For more than 15 years the term “Slope
Scale” has been associated with Brian Laird,
who designed the models and molded
fiberglass for the 48-inch-span foam-wing
and fiberglass-fuselage warbirds and slope
jets. The kits are for experienced builders—
those who already know how to sheet a
wing and finish a fiberglass fuselage, and
aren’t handicapped by sketchy instructions.
The foam cores are shipped for a 50-
inch-span model, and they can be built long
for lighter lift or can be cut down to look
more scale. The airplanes can be built with
balsa leading edges (LEs) and tail parts for
lightness or basswood LEs and tail feathers
for toughness, yielding a ready-to-fly weight
from 28 to 48 ounces and a wing loading
ranging from roughly 12 to 22 ounces per
square foot.
In the days before bounceable sailplanes,
designers implemented individual strategies
to make their models tough enough to
survive a cartwheel landing. Brian felt that
if you could keep the nose from breaking,
and keep the wing intact, the tail parts were
easy enough to replace after a bad landing
or midair disaster; therefore, his models’
nose areas have extra layers of fiberglass
and can have basswood LEs. Some builders
even fit basswood vertical and horizontal
stabilizers.
The airplanes take 20-30 hours to build,
depending on how much time you put into
the paint and polish, but the kits are
available at a reasonable price and take the
simplest radio gear: two standard servos, a
standard 600 mAh battery pack, and a twochannel
radio. These are energy airplanes,
so you have to keep them moving to keep
them flying, but you’ll be rewarded with
exciting flights and an airplane sturdy
enough to tap wings in a tight formation
with other tough-guy airplanes.
Unfortunately Brian is no longer making
these kits. Fortunately Robert Cavazos at
Cavazos Sailplane Design has taken over
production, and one by one he is
reintroducing the Slope Scale airplanes
made from new molds. The new fuselages
have canopy lines molded in, larger fillets at
the wing root so you can build them with a
removable wing if you like, and in some
cases the radio-access hatch is made at the
factory; cutting into a beautiful new
fuselage with a razor saw to make a hatch
opening can be traumatic for some builders.
Robert has completed and is shipping the
Bell P-39 Airacobra, the Curtiss P-40
Warhawk, the North American P-51B
Mustang, the Messerschmitt Me 109, the
Lockheed F-80, and the Northrop F-20
Tigershark. Expected soon in the production
schedule are a Tucano, a Spitfire, a P-51D,
and a Reno Racer Mustang.
Did I tell you I had four Slope Scale
airplanes ready to fly? I meant six; two of
them are hangared out in Gliderland, set to
fly again at Cajon Summit in May. These
puppies are not trivial to ship; it takes some
engineering to get them into a box that fits
within the UPS 130-inch length-plus-girth
size limit. I think the advent of the
removable-wing versions will ease the
shipping headache a little.
Slope fans, here is the most important
thing I have to tell you this month: When
you see a kit that you like from a specialty
maker, put a check in an envelope and buy
it. Buy the airplanes you want while they
are still in production because they may not
be available if you wait.
In this case, we are lucky to have Robert
pick up where Brian left off, but the normal
life cycle of specialty kit makers is often
limited. Maybe they get tired of picking up
the telephone and answering the same old
questions, or perhaps they get tired of
making three bucks an hour for their effort,
and I know some of them fall victim to
Continued on page 130
130 MODEL AVIATION
Pratt Samurai from Sig Manufacturing?
These airplanes were all worth having,
and all are no longer made.
Online Resources: The RC Soaring
Exchange (RCSE), provided by Air Age
Publishing, publisher of Model Airplane
News, is a discussion base that remails 30-
50 messages each day to an international
list of approximately 1,000 subscribers.
The list moderator is well-known Eastern
Soaring League stalwart and F3B pilot
Mike Lachowski ([email protected]),
with his coworker Lex Mierop
([email protected]).
You can view RCSE archives at
www.mail-archive.com/
soaring%40airage.com or
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/soaring. If
you want to subscribe, send an E-mail to
[email protected] with
“subscribe” on the first line and “end” on
the next line in the body of the message.
Make sure you turn off HTML formatting
and send the message in plain text only.
Following are some useful Web sites,
including the RCSD event-coverage
articles, more information for Slope
Scale airplanes, and spring-event contact
info:
R/C Soaring Digest
www.b2streamlines.com/RCSD.html
Randy Carr’s megasite for all types of
Soaring: www.fatlion.com/sailplane/
sailplanes.html
NorCal-flavor Slope Soaring:
Rob Crockett’s site
www.ncws.com/rcrock/index.html
SoCal-flavor Slope Soaring:
Bob Bingham’s site
www.gliderking.com
Midwest-flavor Slope Soaring:
Greg Smith’s site
www.slopeflyer.com
(Now hosting Slope Trash Magazine)
Down East Maine-flavor Slope Soaring:
Dave’s Motorless Flight Site
http://home.adelphia.net/~glidertime
Note the Slope Soarer kit
recommendations rated by pilot
experience level at
http://home.adelphia.net/~glidertime/slope_
sailplanes_typically_are_m.htm
Slope Scale Airplanes:
Cavazos Sailplane Design
12901 Foreman Ave.
Moreno Valley CA 92553
(909) 485-0674
[email protected]
www.rcglider.com
Continued from page 121
RC Slope Soaring
902-538-7395 (Atlantic time please) www.adrianpage.com
M C
60” span 6 ½ lbs. For .60 2 strokes
to .91 4 strokes
Gee Bee R2 kit 139.95
Optional glass pants 25.00
Radial engine kit 10.00
PAGE AVIATION
Gee Bee Z kit 129.95
Optional glass pants 35.00
Radial engine kit 10.00
Both kits feature top quality laser cut balsa and ply parts, pre-bent landing gear wire,
glass cowls, ABS pants, hardware, rolled plans, decal sheet, photo illustrated manuals,
and superb flying characteristics.
95 Lawrence Rd. Berwick NS. Canada B0P 1E0
57” span 5 ½ lbs. For .46 2 strokes
to .56 4 strokes
Order yours today
and build a piece
of aviation history
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