Just For the Fun of It
MOONLESS MADNESS. When I fly these days, I expect to be transported to the flying site in a curtained sedan chair. I don't want the weather to be too cold or too hot. It must not be windy. The grass must be neatly mowed. The pin I need is labeled "Reserved." Kindly guys must assemble my plane, do a range check, and set the idle. Pour me another coffee, light my pipe. Play it again, Sam! It was not always thus. In the days of Charlemagne, neither wind, nor cold, nor snow or sleet stayed our appointed rounds. The natives of far off Cathay, beyond the Sierras, and the Sun Belt, know nothing of the lives of snowbirds and polar bears. Or Vikings. The gentleman with the horns in the picture is Lloyd "Pete" Peterson. No, the snow really is not that deep. The caption says, "Don't fall in the creek, Pete!" Pete: "What creek?" The occasion was the First Annual February 29 Spur of the Moment Fun Fly.
LeCrate
If fun flying is your cup of tea, you'll certainly enjoy Mr. Fun's design for his relaxed style of RC Electrics with 10-min.-plus soaring flights in mind. His has been flown mostly with a Leisure LT-50 with gear reduction, but it also flies quite satisfactory with other 05-size electric motors - either direct drive or reduction. It's your choice whether to build it with parasol wing mount or a cabin - though the conversion from parasol to cabin can be quickly done. I am well pleased with this, my first, Electric airplane design. It has been thoroughly tested in parasol and cabin versions, and with a variety of power systems. It is a good aircraft. One must think twice before inflicting his first of anything on a public which includes a large number of experienced modelers in any design category. I can do so because I have had so much help from many good people - the manufacturers, columnists like Mitch Poling, and through my own column, perceptive inputs from pioneers like Heinz Koemer, Bob Kopski, Gus Munich, and (firsthand in many flying sessions) Don Srull. With such a treasure trove of information, an old FF Rubber and Gas flier (with 36 years of RC sport flying) has no excuse for failing to attain a specific performance envelope.
Just for the Fun of It
I'VE DISCOVERED that some guys don't fly when they see Bill Kaluf and your peerless scribe drive up. They say it's just too much fun watching. Ours is a Chinese Fire Drill in slow motion. That's at Fredericksburg, VA. These guys have a 560-ft. strip mowed twice a week. Overruns are hundreds of feet long. My own club's small site 33 miles west of Washington, DC separates the men from the boys. The Fredericksburg strip centers a lovely wide-open park, site of the Union artillery when Gen. Burnside of the glorious beard became a cropper when he threw pontoon bridges across the close-by Rappahanock and tried to take the Rebs, who coyly were massed behind a stone wall on top of a hill. When I take off to the east, I am distracted by a big house and rose garden off the end of the park, for it was there that George proposed to Martha.
Just for the Fun of It
DOCUMENTATION is a painful chore for folks who enter Scale events. I wonder if you share that view. In simpler days, I built a few hundred so-called Scale jobs, almost all rubber-powered. My research was limited to stumbling over some three-view that caught my fancy. Photos just stirred the juices. I did not bother with details or authentic markings. Many people have libraries of airplane books, drawings, articles, and photos. Documentation sounds dull. Some have a love for everything that ever flew, and the older the subject, the greater the fascination.
Just for the Fun of It
SNOOPY SITS on his dog house. I sit inside mine. It has been a summer of discontent. Whoever said that cabin fever is a wintertime malaise must have been talking to the penguins. Cabin fever is a summertime torture. For two months the temperature bubbled in the 90s, and all along the eastern seaboard was a wet sauna. Fantasy and reality blur. Carl Goldberg was tugging on the back of my pants. We were standing on the high ground at Shangri-la. My Electric was fading in distant lift. Occasionally, a screwball foam 1/2A RC delta whizzed by like a berserk Concorde, piloted by the famed rubber-powered Scale flier, Allan Schanzle. Srull's Electric Sparky was whining faintly, speck-high behind us. Off to the side, a small group of Maxecuters were launching Rubber Scale jobs into dreamy circles. I said to Carl: I must get back to that narrow road behind us to land. Puzzled, he asked why not land it here on the grass. If I tip up, the shaft will bend, I responded. I am forever twisting that shaft like a Rubber model shaft, tweaking it this way and that to check tracking. Let me guide you, offered the great Goldberg. With that, he started to pull me backwards down the slope, while I positioned the circling crate, overhead now, to slide between trees and over cars at the end of the one-lane tarmac, walled 15 ft. away by woods. Dizzy, stumbling backwards, now and then digging in my heels, Carl kept pulling. One supposes that the spectacle of Goldberg facing north while pulling Winter facing south with a crate gliding overhead in circles, was a sublime vision of advanced technique.
