Bubblegun
HOW MANY OF YOU competition free-flight or RC sailplane fliers have gone to an important contest and know that you have the best ship on the field, only to be intimidated by some guy with a clunker of an airplane, but equipped with the latest electronic thermal detecting gear. Worse yet, he might have the best plane on the field and you the clunker. Since he obviously knows that he is taking unfair advantage of the rest of the fliers, he keeps his detecting gear carefully screened from his competition and makes sure that it is inoperative while you are taking your flights. Well, now you can get even and take some of the guesswork out of thermal detection by whipping out your handy, portable, easy to use Bubblegun, and proceed to saturate the air with thousands of floating soap bubbles. By learning the action of bubbles under various atmospheric conditions, you can develop the art to where you can pretty accurately predict whether the time has arrived for you to put your plane into the air.
Contester
I DON'T IMAGINE very many of you ever have heard of the Contester, the almost model-sized full-scale home-built ship with shoulder wing and ridiculously low-slung fuselage belly which almost scrapes the ground. I hadn't either, until I discovered a picture of one while leafing through an old issue of the British publication, Aero Modeller, and it appeared to be an ideal Peanut Scale subject. Correspondence with the magazine editor revealed that the designer and builder was Leon Tefft, who at one time resided in the Chicago area. A search of the phone book and information service failed to turn up such a person, so my next step was to get in touch with the Experimental Aircraft Association of Hales Corner, WI, since the ship carried the "Experimental" logo on its fuselage side.
