CLUB AUCTIONS – We will be holding a club auction at some of the meetings. If you have anything to sell or give away bring it to one of these meetings. You can set a minimum sell price, be realistic or you will pack it back home. 10% of the selling price goes to the club. The auctioneer will set the rules. This would be a good time to dispose of those items that have been accumulating dust and help the club treasury.

Attention RC Pilots:

WINTER FLYING RULES

During November, December,

January, February

Saturday, Sunday & Wednesday

NO FLYING before 12:00 Noon.

CARL HENSON FIELD – Just as a reminder, we will be holding our club meetings for the month of June, July and August at the field. We encourage everyone to come early and fly. We plan on having BBQ’s at the field meetings and will keep you informed. A couple of items for all members – Please make sure that you once you enter Mike Burgess’s drive to our club that your speed is less than 10 MPH. Simply drive slow enough that you are not seeing dust. Field trash – No trash period – this includes cigarette butts. If you see trash pick it up.  Also, every now and then you may find that another member has left the field and forget to pack up a tool, glow plug starter or whatever. If you find anything at the field and you know it’s not yours please put it in the clubhouse FOUND basket. The person that left it and returns to find it will be grateful.

FUN FLY’S OR OTHER EVENTS – We have brought this up at several meetings. If you would like to participate, why not take the lead and set one up. Any member can do this and we encourage new members to step forward and become active.

PIZZA MEETING

Club approved having the March 2008 meeting at Papa’s Pizza on Coburg Road.

NEWSLETTER NEEDS INPUT – As your new newsletter editor, I will be relying on INPUT from the Officers and Members.  I work Tuesday nights and can not attend meetings, so I will have to rely on others to be my “eyes and ears” at the meetings and flying field.  My approach will be to keep the Printed and Mailed version small enough to only need ONE stamp.  The EMAILed version can be as elaborate as we want.  I am requesting that members send me photos and a short write-up on any projects they are working on, or new aircraft.  If you can’t EMAIL it to me, MAIL me a photo and a note.  Also if you have any TIPS or EXPERIANCES you would like to share, I would be glad to pass those along.

My thanks to Bill for the great job he did on the newsletter last year!

PLEASE

IF you have an EMAIL account,

PLEASE request your Newsletter via EMAIL.

STAMPS and PAPER

cost the Club (YOU) money. 

The Gray Pathetic Northleft is, as I type, treating us to a third consecutive day of rain. The fog, too, has been a regular visitor to the field and has hung around into the afternoon. It disperses only when it is sure there’s enough wind to plague us.

Despite all that, there have been a number of flyable days which nobody seems to have taken advantage of. I have been to the strip on a Tuesday, a Wednesday, and a Thursday and have had it all to myself. In two cases, the wind was almost nil and it wasn’t too bad on the third day, either. Am I getting there at the wrong time? The Wednesday, at 12:45, had seen the fog depart and more than just a hint of sun to be seen.

Having the field to myself gave me the opportunity to throw hand-launched gliders out on the runway where the footing is better, resulting in stronger launches. I converted my He-Man HLG to a configuration optimized for sidearm throws instead of overhand which conversion requires a complete rearrangement of the tail assembly and a new fuselage to accommodate the rearrangement. I was getting the feel for how steeply I could launch and just where the release point should be in relation to the wind when my He-Man met an untimely end. It is quite shocking how badly a model will behave when it has been given a good sidearm toss right after the fin has fallen off at the launch site. The noseweight survived, as did the stabilizer, and, of course, the fin which hadn’t taken part in the crash at all. Add another to the list of Winter projects, because things looked promising.

One of the few I have caught at the field is John Byrne. John had a foam (I think) electric Piper Super Cub. A medium-size ship with flexible, plastic wing struts which clip on to the wing but are held with a screw to the fuselage. They are, presumably, functional. And they do work. Somehow, John got the ship into a full-bore vertical dive and recovered by means of a 90 degree  pullout at an altitude of about three feet. It all stayed together - and the elevator must be pretty effective, too. John was taking off very nicely from the ‘electric runway”, but I couldn’t talk him into trying a landing on it.

One thing concerns me about John’s Cub. The transmit­ter says it’s on 27.195 mc. That’s okay; the 27 meg chan­nels are still kosher and probably as safe as any channels now that all the inane chatter from the CB radios has appar­ently been transferred to cellphones.   We have no pins for 27 meg.. This ship flies quite well and could become popular. Are they all on 27.199? The transmitter is also marked “channel 9’, but where did that come from? Channel 05 is 50.90mc. in the Ham band. And I think I may have seen another guy taking one out of a car as I was leaving one day.