The Engine Shop
THE FIRST internal-combustion engine used to power a model airplane in flight was British engineer David Stanger's 1906 four-stroke V-4—spark ignition, of course. Its 6.75-cubic-inch displacement is like that of some of today's Giant Scale power plants. However, it weighed 51/2 pounds, and its output of approximately 1 1/4 horsepower was surpassed years ago by competition two-stroke .15s (glow and diesel types).
The Engine Shop
THERE ARE THREE Joe Wagners who have become well-known in the model-airplane game. One is a top-level rubber-power competitor living in California; another is a New Englander, perhaps best known for his attempt some years ago to manufacture replicas of the post-WW II Bantam .19 and Morton M-5 spark ignition engines. But I'm the Joe Wagner who was Chief Engineer for Veco in the 1950s; organized the Model Engine Collectors' Association (MECA) around 1960; and wrote Model Airplane News' engine column for almost ten years. Now I'm here at Model Aviation to do what I can to help you. This new column is about all kinds of model airplane engines (except Electric motors, rocket power, gas turbines, and pulse jets). We'll talk here about glow, spark ignition, and diesels; modern engines and old-timers; two-strokes and four-strokes; Free Flight engines, Control Line engines, and RC power plants; even CO2 and compressed-air motors. That's a lot of interesting territory to cover!
The Easy Way: Out of Trees
ALTHOUGH FREE FLIGHT flying is fantastic fun, a few aspects of the activity are not. Scrambling up a pine tree after an errant Towline Glider, or helplessly glaring at your Indoor model trapped in the rafters of a gym is no one's idea of a great time. There are better ways to demonstrate the joys of Free Flight to other modeling clans. To minimize my own discomfort and frustration in those situations, I recently designed and built myself a model airplane retriever: a long-reach contraption that extends upward many feet to easily dislodge my models from captivity in trees or gym roof trusses.
The Engine Shop
MY FIRST MODEL AVIATION column isn't out yet, so no reader response has come in, but I have ample engine topics for my second column anyway. Some model engine columns feature detailed analysis and performance tests of new power plants, or troubleshooting for older power plants - I don't plan to use much of either. For one, I've seldom met a model flier who cared greatly about technical trivia, such as whether his engine's piston was made from sintered iron or Meehanite. And although performance tests are all right in their own way, engines from the same production batch can vary widely in behavior and output.
The Engine Shop
ANYTIME someone makes a snide remark to you about your "toy airplanes," you might squelch them with the fact that model aircraft are the highest-powered propeller-driven vehicles in existence. And that's not by any narrow margin, either! Take the speediest and fastest-climbing prop-equipped fighter ever built: Grumman's F8F Bearcat. It weighed 9,334 pounds and had 2,800 horsepower. That's 3 1/3 pounds per horsepower for the Navy fighter version. The recent world-record-setting specially-modified Rare Bear Bearcat came out somewhere around two pounds per horsepower. That's a mighty impressive weight-to-power ratio - until you consider that today's competition Free Flight models nearly double it.
