Free Flight: Sport and Scale
GETTING INTO Free Flight Scale ain't as easy as it once was. Build-on plans, articles, ads for great kits, and tons of supplies of use to FF modelers once filled the model magazines. Every small town used to have a store that stocked things like Japanese tissue, rubber strip, dime kits, and other things kids needed. No more. Nowadays, finding a multipage "build-on" rubber-scale plan in a major magazine would be like finding a Sarah Vaughn track on a Snoop Doggy-Dog compact disc. So how does a newcomer break into this exciting, challenging, and rewarding discipline? One way is to become acquainted with the wealth of resources that are available.
Free Flight: Sport and Scale
SUPER PHATIC ALIPHATIC resin glue is emphatically approved by this columnist! It's a recent arrival on the modeling scene from SAMS in England. It's has a very thin consistency like normal cyanoacrylate (CyA), but it's water-based. One can pin all of the parts together, run a little SP glue around the joints, and then wait until it wicks in and cures. It takes a while to dry (which may upset the "instant results" crowd) but it penetrates the wood well and has excellent strength without the well-known CyA hazards.
Free Flight: Sport and Scale
News from Brno-Medlanky: The big international bash in Central Europe at the end of May is the "Openscale" meet. Free Flight Scale devotees from the Czech Republic (the host country), England, Austria, Holland, France, the US, and Slovakia enjoyed a fine weekend of camaraderie, good food, and excellent flying at the famous Medlanky airfield near Brno, Czechoslovakia. It is interesting to note that although the top American competitor, Charles Hill, finished 12th in Power Scale, models of American airplanes placed first in both Power and Rubber Scale (Jan Kubica won CO2/Electric Scale with a Curtiss P-1; Pavel Stranik took Rubber with a Bellanca trimotor that did 76 seconds!).
10th Flying Aces Nats
ON JULY 18, 1996 hundreds of enthusiastic Flying Aces converged on the somnolent university town of Geneseo, New York for four days of magic at the tenth biennial Flying Aces Club Nationals. The National Warplane Museum in Geneseo has been the site of choice for many years now, and the FAC has begun holding "off-year" contests there as well. Presided over by benevolent dictator Commandant Lin Reichel and adjutants Vic Didelot and Ross Mayo, the FAC now has more than 1,400 members in nearly 60 squadrons in the US, Canada, and England. The 162 contestants and many more attendees attest to the movement's strength!
Free Flight: Sport and Scale
ALUMILITE CASTING PLASTIC: Alumilite is neither aluminum nor is it light. What it is, though, is a low-viscosity urethane casting plastic that beats the daylights out of everything else I have ever used. It is definitely lighter than normal craft-shop casting resin, and it produces almost bubble-free castings of a homogeneous texture. The two-part stuff pours easily, and changes color as it sets up. The process takes approximately three to five minutes. Make a dummy part, paint it with liquid latex (available at craft shops) and you'll have a female rubber mold in which you can pour your part.
