Profile Bearcat
IF NECESSITY is the mother of invention, then the Profile Bearcat was "born" from a need for a flying engine testbed to exercise the merits of a rather wild idea I had about engine performance in a Stunt ship. I wanted to test an engine mounted in the profile position, but not the standard profile setup with the engine mounted facing outboard. I wanted the cylinder facing the inside of the circle. As I will try to explain later, I felt that the performance of the engine was being adversely affected by the standard Stunt ship's inverted mount. The inboard cylinder placement was to let centrifugal force keep the glow plug free of oil and, thus, promote better ignition characteristics and, hopefully, a better Stunt run.
Texas Quickie Rat
Three-up racing with Control Line models is without a doubt one of the most exciting forms of model aircraft competition. Twenty-five years ago, when Control Line flying was flourishing, Rat Racing attracted competitors from all areas of modeling. Even though there was only one form of racing, it often took all day to run the event, because of the many entries. The planes could be built and flown by the average modeler, and he didn't need an engineering degree to design the workings or muscles like Charles Atlas to fly them. Things were just simpler then.
