Radio Control: Giants
DECISIONS, DECISIONS, DECISIONS! When it comes to deciding what your next Giant Scale project will be, the field is wide open. One thing is certain: You've got to really love the airplane you intend to duplicate in miniature. The fascination has to be strong enough to see you through the research, construction, finish, and flying of your chosen model. For some of us, choosing a prototype is easy. Take my old friend, Col. Art Johnson, for example. Art, who writes the scale column for RCM (Radio Control Modeler), chooses to duplicate the aircraft he flew when he was aviating for Uncle Sam.
Radio Control: Giants
BACK IN 1950 the Air Force decided to move yours truly. It was a major displacement-from Moses Lake, Washington, to Panama City, Florida. Like other Air Force moves, professional packers showed up at the house to box up the family's belongings and furniture for shipment. It turned out to be a traumatic experience, as far as I was concerned. At the time, I had a beautiful U-Control model of the Laird Solution, winner of the 1930 Thompson Trophy Race. It was crafted using Cleveland Dwarf (1/2-inch-to-the-foot) drawings, and was powered by a Cox Infant .020 engine.
Radio Control: Giants
BEFORE WE GET TOO DEEP amongst the Giant Scale models-a question: Did you ever notice how difficult it is to locate the mounting holes when sticking an engine in your model? It's particularly hard when you consider the location of the beam mounts that are built into most model engines. There are always either cooling fins or an exhaust pipe directly above the mounting holes. You can't get a straight shot at them with a pencil, drill, or mounting bolt! It's almost as if engine mounting flanges were an afterthought when it came to designing engines.
Radio Control: Giants
I JUST finished installing the pushrods in the fuselage of my current Giant. The kit called for two 1/4-inch dowels to connect the servos to the rudder and elevator. The installation will almost assure that the model will be tailheavy! All that birch in the back with only a .90 up front will require a bit of lead bolted to the firewall before the model will be balanced. Happily, the added weight probably won't adversely effect the model's performance; it has a bunch of wing area and it will fly slowly. Since the dowels were pre-drilled and grooved-making the wire ends simple to install-I went along with the kit designer's method to move the tail, despite the disadvantages of heavy pushrods.
Radio Control: Giants
Foam, foam on the range-or words to that effect. There are two schools of thought about using polystyrene foam to construct RC models and Giant Scale models in particular. The first group feels that using foam produces models that are heavier than they need to be. The second considers foam to speed model construction, provide wings that maintain their airfoil better from root to tip, and they accept the slight increase in weight as a necessary evil.
