Free Flight: Sport & Scale
SHOULD I? I was going to start this month's column with the story about the American model plane kit manufacturer who was nabbed stealing logs from the Petrified Forest, but I decided that it was in bad taste. Besides, who uses balsa anymore? Some of the world's leading model builders are using more and more plastic foam in their ships, and I will even plead guilty to imitating them on occasion. The floats on my Sikorski S-39 were shaped from styrofoam and then sheeted with 1/32-in. balsa using Goldberg's Blue Goo cement. They came out really sturdy, and even if one gets damaged, it will still float.
Free Flight: Sport & Scale
TOGETHERNESS. The Flying Aces Nats was definitely the biggie of 1986, no doubt about it. Thousands of years of modeling experience gathered on green grass with favorable winds is a hard act to follow. In August, however, in the rather obscure all-American town of Tangent, OR, a budding Scale event in the Northwest Free Flight Champs provided an interesting counterpoint. Can you picture a Scale meet where Rubber and Power fly together, where the Scale judge makes house calls to check out your models, and where the camaraderie and level of Scale endeavor is unsurpassed? I first heard of the Oregon bash from Bill Giffen, part of the Canadian contingent that descends on Tangent yearly to do battle with the Yanks. "Giff," CD of the Canadian Nats last summer, painted such a glowing picture of the event that we decided to see if it could be that great. It was better!
Free Flight: Sport & Scale
SILLY PUTTY is this month's challenge. At a recent model meet, Bob Peck showed me a new idea for a dethermalizer which he sells in kit form. It involves packing a slot with that ubiquitous children's plaything, Silly Putty, a semisolid which allows a spring-loaded bit of music wire to pass through it at a given rate, supposedly unaffected by the temperature. Installed on a Hand-Launched Glider, for example, the timing wire would release the stab trigger and bring the model down after the wire had been pulled through the putty. This seems infinitely simpler than the Tomy Toy motor adaptations I have seen. Who will be the first to use Silly Putty on a Scale job to perform useful functions such as motor cutoff, gear-dropping, or other feats of legerdemain?
Free Flight: Sport & Scale
LET'S GO! The IMS show in Pasadena always gets the year off to a good start. Sponsored by Model Builder magazine, it's a great place to meet old friends, get a good bargain or two in the swap-meet area, and get inspired to go home and make models. Bob Peck had the new Jet-X motors in his booth hot off the boat from England. The new fuel needs no screen to prevent orifice fouling, and the wick-long-unobtainable in your local hobby store-starts the stuff by being inserted in a hole in the center of the pellets instead of being coiled around on top. Will we see a resurgence of jet-powered craft? Joe Fitzgibbon of Golden-Age Reproductions was out for the first time from the East, and his booth featured a number of his models built by Bob Schlosberg which were so good that many people refused to believe they were stick-and-tissue! It was sort of sad to see so many kids who knew all about RC cars but had no idea what a rubber-powered Scale model looked like. I will admit to admiring one or two of the new things, myself. Some of the new four-stroke engines are gorgeous, but the Super Cyclone dual-plug engines of yesteryear on display there still get my vote for the all-time beauty queens.
Free Flight: Sport & Scale
SOME guys just refuse to make models with cylinders and engine parts hanging out in the wind. They may tell you that nice, smooth, streamlined shapes fly better as there is less drag, and this is true. Still, we both know the real reason . . . they don't want to go through the trouble of making cylinders for dummy engines! There are a heck of a lot of nifty aeroplanes that have engines that show, and making engines is going to come into your life sooner or later-that is, if you have good taste in aeroplanes! The very simplest way to handle cylinders is to buy Williams Brothers' (available from Hannan's Runway or Peck Polymers) and make the model with a "barely represented" engine. I've even seen planes with Williams' cylinders sticking out the sides of the front end which have nothing covering the holes down their centers, as if the engine had blown the heads right off! I must admit that, from a distance, it was certainly better than nothing. Cutting the end off a nylon or steel screw or bolt (depending on how much weight you need up front) can work if you're in a hurry. Flexible drinking straws have a section which can be cut out and used, and this serves admirably.
