| WITH THE WEEKDAY WARRIORS – August 2006 - Thanks Chuck O'Donnell | |
August 2006 WITH THE WEEKDAY WARRIORS Jim Corbett took this machine in hand and got it working again. I’ve turned out almost a dozen letters, caption lists, and explanations, so it’s time to try a column again. I guess the big news is that the well was driven one weekday this month. There is now a pump feeding a sprinkler system, and, by gosh, water is coming out of it. The system can do half of the strip at a time and the plan seems to be to run it at night. A trial run saw Mike Burges going down and starting the pump at 6:30 a.m. on Friday. Doug McWha turned up at 6:30 Saturday and found the thing still at it with about half a tank of gas remaining. The pump’s original ½ gal. tank was replaced with something adequate for a transpacific flight. The sprinklers get pulled to the side of the strip for flying, but at least once during the trial-and-error period, Doug Wade was landing his EasySport 60 on the West end of the strip while the sprinklers worked on the East end. Come to think of it, Ken Springate was using the east end while the west end was being watered on another day. It was his O.S. 60-powered Chipmunk that Ken was Using that day, but he has also had out a Razzle and a U-Can-Do. The former is a translucent red-and-yellow affair with an O.S. 90 2-stroke and the latter has an engine Ken told me about, but which I didn’t write down. (And that was only this morning!) Doug Wade’s EasySport 60 actually has a 65 in it6, a wonderfully all-blue O.S. 2-stroke. By all the (unwritten) rules of the ER/CA, it should have a 90 or even a 120 up front, but Doug is flying under Chuck Jenkins’s tutelage, so maybe Chuck’s a good influence. Doug’s been making some good landings spoilt only by the nose dipping and letting the prop strike the ground. He’s using one of those knee-action nosewheel legs that Doug McWha likes so much, but here there seems to be a bit too much kneeling taking place. Chuck J. thinks there’s too much weight on the nosewheel and I thing he’s having Doug move the main gear forward a hair or two. Pat Willis has been tutoring Al Barrington and Al has been out with his Eagle on some weekdays, practicing on his own. He claims to get there early before anybody arrives to see him do something unfortunate. Larry Nielson’s big, red Ugly Stik has seen a lot of weekday action, including one gusty day when Larry said hew was getting bumped all over in the air. Dale Williams made a bunch of flight on his Aeromaster one day. This one has an O.S. 61 for power and the O.S has a pump to push that fuel into the carb in large quantities. The Aeromaster is a design that goes back a year or three. It was a Lou Andres kit out of Massachusetts and people were flying Aeromasters when I was still back in N.J. in the early 70's. We may have people in this club who weren’t born when the Aeromasters came out! Stil1 a good design if your are looking for a bipe. Your columnist has been trying to get ready for the Northwest FreeFlight championship which will be going on as you read this — assuming you’re reading it on- 8/19 or 8/20. One day I had my Fubar 36 out to cheek the rotor run. It has a distinctly elderly Tatone timer for the engine run and the Tatone isn’t entirely reliable as far as running time is concerned. Why use it? It’s small and light and there isn’t much to the Fuhar 36. I got a couple of test flights on short runs and another lousy one on a full run, because the stab wasn’t set quite right. Then with the engine, a 54-yr—old Wen-Mac .049, singing (relatively speaking) I launched on another full run. Al B. and Ken S. can attest to it: It was a gorgeous climb which then settled into a beaut of a glide at the end of the 11-sec. run. Ken told me later that they were impressed with the way the Fubar hung in the air and glided on and on. little did they know -at the tine that they were witnessing the fruits of a monumental error on my part. I’d forgotten to light the fuse for the detheromalizer. What should have 1½ min. flight, exceeded by a long shot the 3-min Max you get at the Contest. Not much wind, so the model was in sight when it settled to the ground — or, actually when it settled 25’ up in one of the trees to the southwest of us. I was down there with one of the 21’ fence. pipes held at arms length trying to bat the branch enough to free the plane. Ken came down and between the two of us we steadied the pipe long enough to jam it in the fork where the branch met the rest of the tree. Vigorous shaking freed the Fubar which then dove toward us. Ken caught it, i.e. it hit him in the chest when he couldn‘t get out of the way in time. No damage to Ken and only a tiny spilt in the tissue of the model’s stabilizer - lucky I didn't lose it. You usually get the real brick - lifter thermals when you don’t light the fuse. I spent three June weeks in the UK and attended two delightful air displays. In July I visited the Smithsonian’s new air museum out at Dulles airport. After that, went up in Gods Country (Sussex County, N.J.) and looked in on several small airfields there. The upshot of all this is that I have a ton of photos of old aircraft and some old motor vehicles as well. If yea like old aeroplanes - see me, I’ll have the prints with me at the meeting. If you like jets, well, there might be one in the distant background of one or two pictures. My tastes run more toward Caudron G.4s, Boeing FB-5s, and Fleet Model 7s. C.
O’D.
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