Free Flight: Duration
JAPANESE INDOOR KITS introduced to U.S. A company called Two Worlds (Contact: Jimmy Walker, P.O. Box 449, Novato, CA 94948, phone (415) 897-6789) is importing a line of about a dozen Indoor-model kits from Japan. Models range in size and sophistication from a lightweight AMA Racer sort of thing to Pennyplanes and microfilm-covered models, with a neat little Ornithopter somewhere in the middle.
Free Flight: Duration
TRIPPER STRIPS. Moe Whittemore, writing in the CIA Informer (that's Central Indiana Aeromodellers, folks) presents some interesting results of tests of tripper strips applied to an Indoor Hand-Launch Glider (Trippers are described in Bruce Carmichael's paper in the 1978 NFFS Symposium report, and I recall Hank Cole using them several decades ago.) Moe's trippers look like this: The trippers are 3.5 percent of the chord in width and .012 to .015 in. high. The centers of the five strips are located at the following distances from the leading edge (expressed as percentage of the chord): 28.5, 41.8, 53.8, 65.3, and 77.8. Moe made test glides of the glider with and without the trippers, obtaining the following results, averaged over 13 flights: Without Trippers, With Trippers Sink rate, ft./sec., 1.19, 1.09 Glide speed, ft./sec., 8.56, 9.62 Glide slope, 1 : 7.095, 1 : 8.595 Lift coefficient, 0.896, 0.789
Free Flight: Duration
FF NATS NEWS. Now that Lakehurst, NJ as a Nats site, is down the tube, and Lincoln, NE has been selected, a big effort is going on to have the Outdoor FF action take place closer to Lincoln rather than at somewhere in the great beyond-such as Mead-according to usually reliable sources and my personal FFCIA. The local FFers, upon which all depends-it's Nature's way-have their corporate eyes on three or four sites, one of which is a 1.5-mile square (that counts as 36 squares Out West, I think) of pasture land, close to Lincoln. The intent is to have a unified Nats, if indeed such a thing is desirable, possible, or has really ever occurred before. Indoor events would be in the Lincoln Colosseum (with a second quasi-Nats at West Baden? . . . or would Lincoln be the more quasi of the two?). If all else fails, Outdoor FF would be at Wright Field, with Indoor at WB. By now you probably know all of this. But it would surely be nice to scoop Competition Newsletter on something, sometime!
Free Flight: Duration
TWIN PUSHERS. Twin-pusher canards dominated Outdoor Free Flight for a quarter century, until the early Thirties, for the simple reason that they won! Other configurations were tried, but failed. Why? Perhaps it was simply a matter of everyone following the beaten rut. Indoor single-prop tractors were well understood by then, but the decalage used was like 8 or 10 degrees, which must have put the CG somewhere near the leading edge, OK perhaps for Indoor flying, but far too "loopy" for Outdoor success. (Outdoor models are much happier with small decalage, big tails, long distances between the wing and tail, and then necessarily, a CG position a long ways back from the leading edge, and perhaps even behind the trailing edge.) It would be interesting to trace the transition from twin-pushers to single-tractors in Outdoor competition, but I'll have to leave that up to guys who
Free Flight: Duration
IF YOU WERE TO ASK what's the handiest, most often-used, most indispensable tool in my messy, totally disorganized shop, I'd have to say it's my "jug," it gives me instant, one-hand access to a virtually unlimited supply of Meuser's Patent Elixir, Thinner, and Universal Solvent for cleaning or softening dope brushes, or diluting whatever it is I'm using that needs a bit of diluting. "One-hand" is the key-word; no monkeybiz of laying down what I'm holding in my obverse hand in order to use both hands to unscrew the lid from a gallon can. And since the Elixir is an adhoc combination of every solvent and thinner known to modern or ancient man or beast, it will dilute or dissolve 'most anything in town, except perhaps the glass jar that contains it, and I'd swear that sometimes even that gets a mite limp!
