Ironside
Take the lines of one good looking home-built, add a .10-.15 engine and three-channel controls, sprinkle in easy construction, and you have a nifty RC model that has sport flying qualities to match its great appearance. This is a much-corrupted "reminder scale" version of Ron Scott's fine home-built, Ol Ironsides. The full-size plane first flew in 1969. It is a single-place, C-85-powered, wooden-frame, fiberglass-covered, high-performance beauty. It is one of those airplanes that looks as if it's going 100 mph when it's parked! Full information on Ol Ironsides can be found in the November 1971 issue of Sport Aviation, the journal of the Experimental Aircraft Association.
Misflit
ONE OF MY flying buddies claims that all of my airplanes flit rather than fly. This is not true, for I have been known to fly large fuel-guzzling 40's on occasions, but I do like small, quick airplanes. Misflit is one of these. This same flying buddy also thinks I should build only stand-off scale models with lots of guns and bombs that make lots of smoke and noise, as he does, but to me an airplane that does not look like a model airplane is of no interest. Misflit looks like a model airplane. Misflit is a quick but forgiving airplane. The addition of wing tip plates (something that goes back to my free-flight days before WW II) and built in wash-in in both tips make it an airplane that must be made to snap, and the ailerons remain active well into the stall. To sum up, Misflit is a groovy, rolling, spinning, snapping, looping knife-edging fun-fly winner that will go where you point it, do what you ask of it and, if you ask too much, forgive you.
Lil Pieces
Here's a fun Indoor Rubber model that isn't so delicate as to scare anyone away, no matter what kind of models have been built before. Make it from stuff in your scrap bin - and even some retrievals from the trash! A full-size plan is presented on pages 90-91. If you are, as I am, an RCer who has the nervous jitters when you want to fly, and the circumstances (or the weather) make a trip to the field impossible, an airplane that will fly inside the house may be the answer. Lil Pieces was designed for just that purpose, and it fills the bill even better than anticipated.
Gluing
MORE THAN LIKELY the first glue used by man was animal blood. Although overshadowed by newer products, animal or protein glues are still very much a part of the joining process. These glues are much too heavy and slow-working to be of value to modelers, but there have been armies of full-scale aircraft built with them. In theory, if it were possible to polish two pieces of wood until they were molecularly smooth when touched together, they would become one, and no joint would exist. Glue is designed to fool the two pieces into thinking they are that smooth and are suppose to join.
Building Board
A smooth, flat building board is needed if your models are to start off with only the warps or twists that you intended to put in. Add a surface of Fome-CorTM, and then you can push in hold-down pins with ease. Here's how.
