Radio Control: Pylon Racing
WELCOME, Pylon Racing fans! Many thanks to the editorial board of MA for providing me with this "bully pulpit" (as Teddy Roosevelt once called the presidency), and again, thanks to retiring columnist Bill Hager for leaving some mighty big shoes to fill. I'll do my best. You're part of it. Send me race reports, hints and kinks, and photos of your racing buddies. It'll be tough to fill this column otherwise. Until I can build up a little backlog of mail, I'll have to resort to giving away my speed secrets-and Lord knows there aren't many of those. Please include a SASE with any requests for info.
Radio Control: Pylon Racing
GREAT WALLS O' FIRE: It's building season. By now you should have three or four Quickies salted away and ready to test-fly as soon as the sun comes out, and you're thinking about trying that Quarter 40 stuff. Maybe with an APRA (Arizona Pylon Racing Association. Typical APRA engines are the Thunder Tiger and ASP .40s, priced around $100) sport engine to start with, just for grins; they fly great that way. But wait, those airplanes use fiberglass fuselages! You'd have to put in a firewall! What to do? Because of variations in engine dimensions, firewall installation is not a typical "prefab" feature; you have to do it yourself. If you've never done it before, the thought of attacking your shiny new fish with a Moto-Tool(r) is admittedly rather scary.
Radio Control: Pylon Racing
BARRIER CAGE UPDATE: In the January column 1 alluded to the fact that AMA would soon be receiving the final, and hopefully definitive, results from the barrier cage testing undertaken by Lee Webster, with input from Al Watson and representatives of the NMPRA (National Miniature Pylon Racing Association). I expressed optimism that the results would confirm the adequacy of our existing barrier cages. Mr. Webster presented his report on Friday, October 23, 1998, at a meeting of the AMA Safety Committee in Muncie. I was there, as were Mr. Watson; NMPRA president Vern Smith; current AMA president Dave Brown; former AMA president Don Lowe, chairman of the Safety Committee; and various other luminaries.
Radio Control: Pylon Racing
QUICKIE, QUICKER, Quickest: Wow, the mail is really pouring in from the January column, in which I had the audacity to suggest that AMA Quickie (Event No. 428) could stand to be slowed down a little. Right now the record is 1:06-a couple of seconds away from Formula I and Quarter 40 on the same course. Quickie never used to be that fast, nor was it ever meant to be. Most of the increase occurred in 1991, when Henry Nelson one-upped Rossi in the tuned-muffler department. Rossi's tuned muffler wasn't much better than the "common expansion chamber muffler" required by the rules, and it wasn't easy to see anything different about it from the outside.
Radio Control: Pylon Racing
How to Make a $50 Propeller From a $3 Piece of Wood: So you want to go fast? Insanely fast? In Quarter 40, the propeller (prop) makes the difference between those related, but different, flight regimes. There's been chatter on the Internet lately (www.rcairplanes.com) about the high price of premade-and in some cases, pre-test-flown-wooden props for Quarter 40. Some people are advocating a rules change to allow carbon-fiber propellers, on the belief that once you have a good prop, you're less likely to break it on landing, and you can rule for eternity.
