| WITH THE WEEKDAY WARRIORS – March – November 2007 Thanks Chuck O’ O'Donnell | |
March 2007 WITH THE WEEKDAY WARRIORS
The weekend guys had a rice Saturday and Sunday on the 3rd & 4th and were boasting of having eight or nine fliers out on the field. On the following Tuesday, the Weekend Warriors topped that with a good, round fifteen. Chuck Jenkins was kept hopping by virtue of having three students to look after. Vein Wells is still flying that Nexstar with the fixed, perforated flaps. Don Hudson is just starting out with a Tower Superstar he bought from Chuck Foster. It’s got a Tower .40 up front for power and Don says he “scares the hell out of Chuck regularly”. Nah. Mr. Jenkins has been at the instructor game too long to be scared by anything a student might do. He might blink a bit at some of the more atrocious didos, but scared, no. Morris Ostravsky was flying his Sierra with occasional oversight from the hard-working Jenkins. Morris, you’ll remember, is the poor soul who lived a couple of blocks from the Lorane field and got back into R/C because of it. Now he has to come all the way up to Alvadore Rd.. Having sold the SuperStar to Don, Chuck roster pulled a Sig Kadet Sr. kit from under the table and built it as a taildragger, not an uncommon mod on that model. Power is an old ASP .61 and it’s plenty. Chuck is quite pleased with the machine and I hear rumors of a possible glider-launching cradle in the offing. President Willis showed up with his Showtime, that big bird with the gas engine. You know, the one that will just hang on its prop for half the flight. Capable of doing it for the full flight, I suspect. Frank Blain, freed from the burdens of the Presidency, was flying his Excelleron with abandon and had a new model as well. it’s a Venus II and has another of Frank’s favor-ite YS 110s for power. Now Franks YS 110s seem to burble along quite happily, but the one in Mel Graham’s Extra has proven fiddly. He did get in at least one flight on his Funtana (YS 91) and upon landing was alleged to have come in between the fence wires at the west end of the strip. Rich Richardson brought out his fleet of own-design electrics. Am I wrong or is he starting to get sorted out the newer of the two canards? Rich also brought an electric helicopter which he sold to Pat Willis. Pat immediately began to fly it quite competently and says it is a much better flying machine than the smaller electric chopper he has been trying out. Raleigh Williams added to the electric crowd and initially trotted out a J-3 which had been supplied without ailerons. Raleigh added them — must be the only J-3 with strip ailerons. The prudent range check revealed a problem, so his flying was done with one of those boomed pushers that look like slicked-up Curtiss Juniors. With all those people on the field, someone was hound to put a foot wrong and Al Storey managed to hit the fence on an approach. The fence fought him off and bounced Al’s Tiger II back on its tail which broke. The break is in the fuselage right ahead of the tail surfaces and is an easy fix. The power in the Tiger II is a Super Tigre (appropri-ate) 45 Al bought at a swap meet for $5.00 sans carb and muffler. He’s added those amenities, of course, arid the ST seems to be serving Al quite well. An errant takeoff by Morris Ostrovskys Sierra hit the fence and broke the top wire. A repair party consisting of Pat (he had rubber-handled pliers), Frank, and Doug sallied to the rescue. Doug was the one with the rubber gloves, so he was detailed to hold the wire taut while the connection was reestablished. This was accomplished in a trice, at which point Doug discovered that some of the rubber coating had worn off the gloves. He voiced, loudly, his consterna-tion and was roundly jeered by the other members of the party for making such a fuss merely because high-voltage electricity was coursing through his body. When not lighting up like an incandescent bulb, Doug McWha was flying, not that ratty old EasySport, but something called a Harrier, not to be confused with the VTOL jet of the same flame. This one has a see-through covering that reveals an abundance of lightening holes in the structure of the thick wing. Engine is the Magnum .52 that powered Doug’s late, lamented U-Can-no. You may have noticed that I have stopped noting which models are ARFs. I have adopted a “Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell” policy on AREs. You don’t tell me and I won’t ask. That way I won’t have to put your name on the list of “people to be dealt with” when model builders take back aerormodelling. C.
O’D.
April 2007 WITH THE WEEKDAY WARRIORS
The weekday crowd had a few nice days early in the month and they made the most of them. The usual cast of Haley, Jenkins, McWha, Richardson, Springate, Storey, Wade, and Wells were on-stage most of the time, flying, most of the time, their usual machines. Rich Richardson now has what I’ll call the Mk.II model of that all-dowell parasol—winged electric with the pointed wingtips. The landing gear legs hang from a horizontal strut that sticks out both sides of the fuselage, giving him a wider track and a cleaner installation than before. Rich has done away with the somewhat clumsy strut arrangement for bracing the wings and this wing is wire-braced and much cleaner. (Okay, okay, thread, not wire, but you get the idea.) Hooked a thermal one day and Rich had to force it down. Doug Wade brought out an old Topflite Elder, which was one of those generic pre-WWI types that kit companies thought up. I think this one, powered by an old Fox .35, might be ex-Bill Bodley. Anyhow, Chuck Jenkins test-flew it and found it quite amenable to left turns, but equally ada-mant about not turning right. That was being looked into when last I heard. On the other hand, Bob Haley knows well what’s causing his EasySport 40, so docile in the air, to be a handful on the ground. Bob says the problem is Bob Haley and it’s being worked on. Ken Springate has a most unusual aeroplane for these parts -- a Funtana 90 with an 0.S. .91 in it!. That’s right, a 90 size model with a 90 in it rather than a 120, 140, or 180. Ken’s been trimming the Funtana and has it flying satisfactorily, but “I don’t love it”. Bob Barrow and Dale Williams were working as a team with Bob’s Robin Hood. That’s a very large old World Engines kit that vaguely resembles the Curtiss Robin of the late 20s. Bill Hastings used to fly one of these models down at the Creswell field, you may remember. The Barrow version is powered by a Zenoah G28, a bulky gas-burner which delights Dale, the pilot, with its easy starting and steady running. Am I right in remembering that there was some talk of towing gliders with this bird? That’s talk in the dim, dark past, I mean. The Robin Hood and the Zenoah date back to the prehistoric era of the “Big Bird” movement. I’m not sure that World Engines is still in business nor that the Zenoah is still made. That’s okay. Bob and Dale (and I) are pretty prehistoric too, when you come right down to it. Curtiss Johnson acquired Ray Tatum’s 4-Star 40 from Bill Hollingsvorth. He has done away with Ray’s Batman color scheme and recovered the plane entirely. If I heard correctly, this was a matter of necessity, because Curtiss decked the 4-Star rather quickly. He seems to have gotten the handle on it now and it’s flying very nicely. Tell me, has anybody else on any field of ours ever said, “Watch my stuff; I have to go into town and take a Marine Biology final exam”? Alan Wellinton of the South Lane Club came up to Alvadore on one of those nice days with one of his helicopters. This one is a Freya and one of those big eggbeaters powered by am 0.S. .91. It rolls, loops, does wingovers, flies inverted - with some help from Alan, of course. Somebody asked him how long he’d been flying this particular chopper and he had a classic helicopter-flier reply ‘Which part?. Alan is yet another guy who has turned up lately with one of those Spectrum radios which can fly with any other radio, anytime, and not interfere nor be interfered with. That’s a half-dozen or more at this field since the first of the year, isn’t it? The things are breeding like rabbits. Ivan Walker is just starting out in this madness. Just starting — at the stage where the radio, engine, plane, and everything else are still in the offing. He’s been looking at everything and talking to everybody and asking all the questions. Fe has found by now that, if you talk to ten different people, you will hear ten different views. He’ll take what’s running as a common thread through all of them and figure that for the basics — von all did that — and he’ll sift through the fringe stuff ho see what suits his own style and adopt that. As we all did, even those of us who did it back in prehistoric times. Of course, our lot had to un-learn some things like winding escapement rubber, tuning the receiver with earphones at the start of every day at the field (with a Deltron, it was before every flight!), and running a copper ground line between the battery nega-tive pole and every metal part on the plane I have an old pal back in N.J. who pines for “the good old days of rudder-only”. I tell him he’s stark, raving, mad. I know some of you fool around with computer simulators for models, but do any of you do much with such simulation for full-size aircraft? I have an old friend in Great Britain who is a nut on the subject and is looking for some-body over here to discuss things with. He’s not a modeler now, though he used to build plastics before his eyes started giving out. He’s an historian and has a fair amount of experience flying around in Yorks and Hastings, including jumping out of the latter at Suez in ‘56. If you are inter-ested, see me for his address. We get mail back and forth in three to four days. C.
O’D.
May 2007 WITH THE WEEKDAY WARRIORS
I think we’ve been getting more decent flying days than we usually get this time of the year. Don Hudson and Vein Wells have continued to fly under the tutelage of Chuck Jenkins and both seem to be making some progress. There have, however, been a few occasions when quick work on Mr. Jenkins’s part has prevented a nasty litter problem on the runway. Chuck also gives Morris Ostrovsky a hand, but Norris seems to be more on his own than not. Mel Graham and ex-pres. Frank Slain are both flying Venus IIs. Mel’s has an 0.S. 120 2-stroke and Franks a YS 110 4-stroke. Both fliers are very high on the handling qualities of the Venus TI. Al Storey has a Venus 40 with his usual Super Tigre .46 in it and Al says that - for him it’s a handful. Al Barrington is flying his old faithful Eagle II, but the Smog Hog (0.S. .60) has been in the air and so has his new Tiger 60. This last is powered by one of those Tower 60s with the vividly purple cylinder head. It was running quite well until one of the carb screws backed out, leaving a neat hole between the carb and the shaft valve. Neat, but it allows in lots of extra air and thoroughly spoils the carburation. President Pat Willis does most of his flying with that enormous Yak 54, the one with the 3W70 gas-burner up front. Odd, but Pats dad, who flies full-size aerobatics, says the Yak 54 is regarded as a bit of a dog, while Pat is quite pleased with the models flying qualities. Other Willis flying machines have included his electric Falcon helicopter (ex-Rich Richardson) and his glow Raptor 30. He’s looped the Falcon, but In, not sure if he has the Raptor. Willis non-flying machines include his Giles 202 which has the engine from his Extra. Said engine has some ailment of its capacitate-discharge ignition system and has been a paragon of non-cooperation. While we’re with helicopters it can be reported that Alan Wellentin has been practicing spot landings with a Synergy, another of his whacking great 90-size machines. Alan puts a small piece of carpet out on the runway and tries to hit it from a fast approach. On or very close most of the time, too. There’s another Tower 60 in Scott Dillon’s Hobbistar 60 Mk III along with another of those Spectrum radios. Pat helps or the landings, he says, but Scott seems to be on his own otherwise. All the way from Florence comes Mike Vaughn to fly his large Christen Eagle very carefully”, according to Mike. This one has a Saito 180, with which Mike isn’t entirely happy. He flies his Twist with rather more abandon and nothing untoward has befallen it so far, even with something as big as a Saito 82 up front. Ah, if only we could make such a happy report on the Twist Doug McWha has, er, had. He buried it. Took two hands and a hearty tug to get the portion with the engine up out of the ground. Pat offered glue and Morris duct tape, but it was a lost cause. Why the crash - signal reflecting off the barbed-wire fence; an errant gust of wind acting only on Doug’s plane; sun, moon, and stars not in perfect alignment? Doug’s assessment was a bluntly honest, “I dumb-thumbed it”. If you are keeping track, that’s the third Twist to have met its end at the hands of The McWha himself. There are rumors of an impending 60-size Twist which should result in a louder thump. Mow about the time you are sitting down to read this, your columnist should be sound asleep due to the nine-hour time difference between here and Rome. I’ll have been out to the Italian AF Museum and I’ll be doing my damndest not to lose all my camera gear to a thief as I did two years ago. My intention is to take more pictures than any sate man would want to take. All this means that I won’t be here to rewind you to celebrate the Both anniversary of Lindbergh’s flight to Paris on the 20th and 21st. Let me remind you that, while the plane might have been built out here on the Left Coast down in San Diego, that Wright whiirlwind that ran for 33½ hours was built in the land of my birth, Paterson, New Jersey. Seventy-five years ago on the same two days, Amelia Earhart became the first woman transatlantic pilot by flying her Lockheed Vega from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland to a farm near Culmore, Ireland. On the 29th, you can mark the 88th anniversary of the first-ever Atlantic flight by the six-man crew of the U.S. Navy’s flying boat NC-4. And you know that Ag Cat that’s been working around the area lately? The first one of those flew fifty years ago on the 27th. So there you are, plenty of reasons to party. C.
O’D.
June 2007 WITH THE WEEKDAY WARRIORS
Doug McWha was grieved about the way the main landing gear legs on his Twin Star kept bending on him. For no reason at all, of course; certainly not due to any sort of hard landing. He replaced the original legs with those front one of the larger Ultrasports. These don’t have a nice 90 degree bend but rather bend at a fairly large obtuse angle, so that the wheels are now out near half—span. Looks a little funny, but has not interfered with the flying qualities of the Twin Star and Doug is pleased with the ground handling. Doug Wade has been flying a Siq Kavalier. This is an ex-John Doyle machine with a Como .40 in it. How long has it been since you’ve seen a Como? I never was sure what, if any, connection they had to Super Tigre, other than both being Italian. Doug Devereaux’s Twist has been modified by some changes made to the incidences and some other details. It’s powered by one of those Evolution .40s with the curved fins wrapping around the cylinder. Doug says it has been running as well as you could ask for a brand—new engine. (Note: That’s three Dougs. I think the club can, possibly, accommodate one more and then it really has to stop.) Look at the tail of Joe Owens’s ship and you’ll see what it started out as. Joe had a Sr. Falcon he’d bashed up once too often, so he turned it into a tail dragger, lopped a couple of rib bays off the wings, added tip rates, and did away with the canopy. It has a good old 0.S. .61 up front, an FSR, I think, with the separate frontplate. Joe is Very happy with the way it is performing. Pat Willis, Alan Wellintin, and Marty Wittman, have all had multiple helicopters out to fly. Pat has put a .50 in his Raptor 30 and, to no one’s surprise, it is a lot live-lier. Alan has acquired a Raptor 30, also with a 50, from a guy who was said to be tired of fighting it”. Alan is tuning it up and, if I heard correctly, is thinking of using it with a buddy box to introduce interested fliers to the joys of rotary-winged flight. The sharp—eyed amongst you will have noticed the new vent in the roof of the trailer. If you’ve looked inside you will also have noticed that the hole under the vent is a bit, er, ragged. The story is this: Al Barrington’s Tiger 60 got caught in a particularly nasty bit of gusty wind and turbulence, causing Al to become just the least bit disori-ented. Fortunately, the roof of the trailer kept him from putting the Tiger 60 into the ground. (Was “fortunately’ really the word I wanted there?) Making a virtue out of necessity, the vent was put over the hole to keep air flowing through the trailer in the hot months to come. Al was the only one there when it happened, but he confessed right away. Upon hearing the tale, certain members of the club hierarchy laughed immoderately. He’s taken enough ribbing. Now you’ve read the story; that’s enough. Dustin Miller, who soloed only recently, was flying his trainer the other day and doing something very smart. He was shooting a whole flock of touch—and-goes. Worth doing that from time to time, even if you aren’t just newly—soloed. Dustin’s using a plain—vanilla O.S. .40 and John Burns has the same in his PT—40. Has O.S. given up using those vivid, not to say lurid, colors on their cylinder heads? That Sig Somethin’ Extra that Chick Foster is flying was built fro. a kit. Is anybody listening? A kit! There’s a new Tower .46 in it which is performing well and Chick is high on the Somethin’ Extra. Randy Sewell was on the buddy box with Pat the other day and it was to be solo—or—die time. He seemed to be coming along okay, except for running it into the grass on takeoff just as I was leaving. By the way, Randy bought his wife one of those tiny indoor helicopters with the infra—red control system. They had a ball with it indoors, leading her to remark, “we need a bigger helicopter”. And, yes, they found out that the sun does do things to that infra—red system if you try to fly it outdoors. Are you ready for this? Are you sitting down? Your columnist flew H/C for the first time in four years recently and the model survived. It was my Aquilla sailplane, a 100” rudder—elevator—spoiler ship and a design that was World Champion — in 1977. The rubber on my high—start has seen better days, alas, and I was getting less that half the altitude I should have gotten. A gas ship, a 15—650 with yet another O.S. .61 FSR, is on my work bench being teased back into airworthiness. If “15-~69O” doesn’t ring any bells, it’s a 1~—5O0 enlarged for a .60. If “15—500” still leaves the hells silent, well, just wait until I bring it to the field. I went to the Italian AF Museum at Vigna di Valle. I took all the pictures I said I would. I spent 3½ days in two hospitals in Rome. You want to know about Roman hospitals? Old building, new equipment, 1st—class people. And I hung on to the pictures which are available for viewing. C.
O’D.
July 2007 WITH THE WEEKDAY WARRIORS
Doug McWha was grieved about the way the main landing gear legs on his Twin Star kept bending on him. For no reason at all, of course; certainly not due to any sort of hard landing. He replaced the original legs with those from one of the larger Ultrasports. These don’t have a nice 90 deg bend but rather bend at a fairly large obtuse angle, so that the wheels are now out near half—span. Looks a little funny, but has not interfered with the flying qualities of the Twin Star and Doug is pleased with the ground handling. Doug Wade has been flying a Sig Kavalier. This is an ex—John Doyle machine with a Como .40 in it. How long has it been since you’ve seen a Como? I never was sure what, if any, connection they had to Super Tigre, other than both being Italian. Doug Devereaux’s Twist has been modified by some changes made to the incidences and some other details. It’s powered by one of those Evolution .40s with the curved fins wrapping around the cylinder. Doug says it has been running as well as you could ask for a brand—new engine. (Note: That’s three Dougs. I think the club can, possibly. accommodate one more and then it_ really has to stop.) Look at the tail of Joe Owens’s ship and you’ll see what it started out as. Joe had a Sr. Falcon he’d bashed up once too often, so he turned it into a taildragger, lopped a couple of rib bays off the wings, added tip plates, and did away with the canopy. It has a good old 0.5. .61 up front, an FSR, I think, with the separate frontplate. Joe is very happy with the way it is performing. Pat Willis, Alan Wellintin, and Marty Wittman, have all had multiple helicopters out to fly. Pat has put a .50 in his Papier 90 and, to no one’s surprise, it is a lot live-lier. Alan has acquired a Raptor 30, also with a 50, from a guy ‘ho was said to be ‘tired of fighting it”. Alan is tuning it up and, if I heard correctly, is thinking of using it with a buddy box to introduce interested fliers to the joys of rotary—winged flight. The sharp—eyed amongst you will have noticed the new vent in the roof of the trailer. If you’ve looked inside you will also have noticed that the hole under the vent is a bit, er, ragged. The story is this: Al Barrington’s Tiger 60 got caught in a particularly nasty bit of gusty wind and turbulence, causing Al to become just the least bit disoriented. Fortunately, the roof of the trailer kept him from putting the Tiger 60 into the ground. (Was ‘fortunately” really the word I wanted there?) Making a virtue out of necessity, the vent was put over the hole to keep air flowing through the trailer in the hot months to come. Al was the only one there when it happened, but he confessed right away. Upon hearing the tale, certain members of the club hierarchy laughed immoderately. He’s taken enough ribbing. Now you’ve read the story; that’s enough. Dustin Miller, who soloed only recently, was flying his trainer the other day and doing something very smart. Re was shooting a whole flock of touch-and—goes. Worth doing that from time to time, even if you aren’t Just newly—soloed. Dusting using a plain—vanilla 0.S. .40 and John Burns has the same in his P’P-40. Has 0.S. given up using those vivid, not to say lurid, colors on their cylinder heads? That Siq Sornethin’ Extra that Chick roster is flying was built fro. a kit. Is anybody listening? A kit! There’s a new Tower .46 in it which is performing well and Chick is high on the Somethin’ Extra. Randy Sewell was on the buddy box with Pat the other day and it was to be solo-or-die time. He seemed to be coming along okay, except for running it into the grass on takeoff just as I was leaving. By the way, Randy bought his wife one of those tiny indoor helicopters with the infra-red control system. They had a ball with it indoors, leading her to remark, ‘we need a bigger helicopter”. And, yes, they found out that the sun does do things to that infra-red system if you try to fly it outdoors. Are you ready for this? Are you sitting down? Your columnist flew R/C for the first time in four years recently and the model survived. It was my Aquilla sailplane, a 100” rudder—elevator—spoiler ship and a design that was World Champion — in 1977. ‘The rubber on my high—start has seen better days, alas, and I was getting less that half the altitude I should have gotten. A gas ship, a 15—650 with yet another 0.S. .61 FSR, is on my work bench being teased back into airworthiness. If ‘15-650” doesn’t ring any bells, it’s a 13—500 enlarged for a .60. If “l5-650” still leaves the bells silent, well, just wait until I bring it to the field. I went to the Italian AF Museum at Viqna di Valle. I took all the pictures I said I would. I spent 3½ days in two hospitals in Rome. You want to know about Roman hospitals? Old building, new equipment, 1st—class people. And I hung on to the pictures which are available for viewing. C.
O’D.
August 2007 WITH THE WEEKDAY WARRIORS
Some of this month’s action I saw only from a distance because I was down at the west end of things, getting models prepared for the Northwest Freeflight Championships which were flown this past weekend (18th & 19th). This means I don’t have all the details in some cases, but I will forge ahead. On the day that I was trimming my Scale entry, Greg Knecht was flying a fairly large electric, flipping it around, hanging on the prop, — you know, that sort of thing. Since in cutting all those didos, Greg never got beyond the end of the runway and since, 42’, l2-oz., Scale Rubber ships with lots of draggy struts don’t stray far from the launch point, we never interfered with each other. Treasurer Al Barrington was cruising around with his Astro Hog while I was trimming out my Jabberwook, a ship that climbs higher and roams farther than the Scale ship. Once the prop folds and the plane is gliding, the ‘Wock really moves pretty slowly, so Al had no trouble going over, under, or around it. The Astro Hog is quite a good sport ship, but, in its day (late 50s), it was the hot Pattern plane and they had taken the horsepower race to new heights by putting massive .45s into them. “Where will it all end?”, we wondered, Well, we all know it hasn’t ended yet, don’t we? Jim Corbett brought out an original electric which I will try to describe. Sort of an hexagonal pyramid with three trapezoidal fins (wings?) spaced at 120 deg around the wide (rear) end and carrying the rudder and elevons. Up at the sharp end were three smaller triangular fins spaced at 120 deg, but 60 deg out of phase with the others. The elec-tric motor is a pusher and we asked Jim if he had ever set it on the tail and VTO’d it. He said he had, but that it led to “too high a glue budget’. There’s a skid on it for landing and Jim just takes the plane by this and casually tosses it into the air. He was also testing an original flying wing which flies fine for a while, then buries itself in the gentle Oregon soil. A dicey speed controller is suspected. Beside these strange contraptions stands a rather conventional ship, a joint venture with Doug Deveraux, that seems to have no problems. Another of those events I saw only from afar was a mishap Joe Owens had with his much-modified Sr. Falcon. All the covering peeled off the top of the left wing shortly after takeoff. This leads to a certain amount of drag which results in a certain loss of lift which brings on a rollover and things don’t get any better after that. I was too far away to see how badly the rest of the structure had fared. Looked bad, but it’s hard to tell. Saturday, I saw a guy launch an A ship (.19 engine) straight up, whereupon it described a 100’ high inverted letter “U” and vent in under full power. The wing was shattered; the stab ditto; the fuselage was unhurt. Continuing for a moment ,truth this dreary litany of disaster, Larry Nelson’s twin-boomed “combat” model got into a tight spiral from which it could not be extricated. It got pretty badly battered, but Larry didn’t even hint about “I got hit!. He suspects that a receiver of ques-tionable reliability caused the wreck. Ken Sprinqate has gone and done it. Put an 0.S. 1.20 2-stroke into his Funtana 90. Still tuning it up at last report, but things are going well so far. Frank Blain brought out something with an even bigger engine. This was an 8’ Laser with a Stihl chainsaw engine under the cowl. The plane had been flown down at Short Mountain, but flat, I think, since. I had to go home before Frank flew it that day — if he flew it; it was very windy. ‘Way back, before the Extra and the Giles, et all, the laser was the aerobatic model to have. Vern Wells is raw flying an EasySport. Chuck Jenkins still sits nearby, hut I think Vein is doing most of the flying. He does have a penchant for hard left turns immediately after takeoff and sometimes before actually leaving the ground. After seeing so much of Doug McWha’s example of the sane model, I almost didn’t recognize Vern’s as a EasySport. For one thing, all the covering is on it and its a nice, clean white. F4U-lAs. Enough. No, rake that ‘too many”. Build a -4 with the intake in the bottom lip of the cowl or a -5 with the two cheek intakes. Build one of the FAA’s Corsair Is with the square wingtips and Brit camouflage as a change from that monotonous Glossy Sea Blue. The F2Gs had longer noses and bubble canopies. If you are not entirely wedded to “Warbird”, there are some slick racer color schemes for them, too. Best of all - build the XF4U-1, the prototype, with the birdcage canopy three feet farther forward and gun ports in the top lip of the cowl. I’ll have to gripe about WWI and civil aircraft one of these days. C.
O’D.
September 2007 WITH THE WEEKDAY WARRIORS
What with continued cooperation from the weather, the usual guys have been out flying the usual models. Don Hutson has his high-wing trainer; Vern Wells his EasySport. Both continue to fly under the watchful eye of Chuck Jen-kins, Mel Graham has had his Funtana, Extra, and Venus II at the field pretty regularly and Ken Springate also has a Funtarta that he flies ouite often. That’s when he’s not flying his Twist or his W.U.E. (Worlds Ugliest Extra). Okay, okay; it flies rather well, but it is ugly. Al Barrington’s Astro Hog sees a lot of air-time. He gets to the field early, so he continues to have to contend with my Rubber ships. Lately, it was an Earl Stahl Gypsy, a 1939 Wakefield I was readying for the Old-Timer meet on 9/8 and 9/9. Or his second pass, Al discovered that the Gypsy was well above him and still climbing, so 0-T Rubber and 0-T R/C continue to be compatible. Doug McWha now flies a 60-size Twist on the rower of the Magnum .91 2-stroke that was in his late, though not- much-lamented, 4-Star 60. Three 40-size Twists have suf-fered shocking indignities at the hands of The McWha, but this one is a bigger, tougher article and may be able to stand up to him. I got to the field ore morning, unloaded my stuff down in my usual corner, then brought the car back up to the gravel lot. Doug had been in the air when I got there and called over to me that his throttle was rot working and he’d be flying until it went dead-stick. I walked back down to my spot, put the Mobar 507 together, ran the engine to check the shutoff and dethermalizer functions, refueled, and was ready for a flight. And Doug flew on. Remarkable how long that Mag .91 ran on a 17-oz. tank. There's another Twist 60 on the field, this one in the hands of Mike Vaughn. Mike was ratter more restrained in his choice of powerplant; it’s a 91, but a Saito 4-stroke. Talk to Doug and this Twist is a squirrel. Talk to Mike and it’s a baby carriage. We need a third guy to build one and resolve the impasse. You probably know that pat Willis’s Yak 54 lost a wing in flight, then became completely discouraged and retired from the aviation game. The Yak, not Pat, who brought out a now example of the same machine. It’s bigger, heavier, but flies better on tie same 3-W 70, so That is quite satisfied. All did not come up roses in the Willis stable, though, as, on the same day as the new Yaks debut, Pat put paid to his Raptor 30 (with a 50) helicopter. Well into a perfectly routine flight, all the controls shut down at the top of a loop. The Raptor came across the strip, rolling upright as it came, hit the leg of a table, went bouncing across the gravel, and fetched up just inside the field to the south of us, much the worse for the experience. At a pinch, it is repairable, but Pat is leaning toward a new helicopter. Maddeningly, when brought back to the table, all the servos worked. Several broken rods up in the rotor head, but when they broke is anybody's guess. Very few at the strip that day, so nobody was in danger. Bob Barrow claimed that he’d not only jumped through the door into his car, but right on through out the other side- I do think we can discount that by at least 50%. By the way, Pats transmitter, which keeps track of such things, said he'd had 21 hrs. on the Raptor. You have seen Rich Richardson’s electric Amp Riders, the ships with the wire (thread)-braced parasol wings, pointed wingtips, wood dowel construction, and minimal fuselage. He’s gone and enlarged the design a bit. The (flant Rider has a 12’ span and the wing is still of dowel con-struction, hut the bracing is now real wire and the covering is aircraft Dacron. The fuselage is of riveted aluminum tu-bing and power is a China-built gas-burner which looks like a chainsaw engine, but is meant specifically for model aircraft use. Early in the game, Rich added to the rudder -and the latest development (Labor Day) is a pair of sharply-dihedraled, sheet aluminum wingtips which Rich says improved both rudder response and lateral stability enormously, lust as on the Amp Riders, this one has a torsion-bar landing gear. (and the handsomest set of wheels I’ve seen in a long time) Jim Corbett made the initial flight of this 18-lb. bird, but Rich has been flying it since. On the other end of the size scale from Pats Yak and Rich's new ship, we find the small electric Gene Parro was flying the other day. Looks as though it might be a Piper Super Cruiser and Gene ROGed from the wooden electric runway” and flew around for a good seven minutes before not quite hitting the grass runway and ending up in the chaff. Ron Sutton is not a newcomer to r/c, having done a lot of flying on a Gentle Lady with a power pod. He did have a short layoff after the glider hit the dust, hut is now getting into power flying with a Goldberg Eagle II. His tutor? Who else? Chuck Jenkins. You have seen that Paul MacCready, he of the Gossamer Condor and Channel-crossing Gossamer Albatross, and an old Indoor flier, died on the 28th of August at age 81. The obit in The New York Times had a great quote. In 1992, MacCready told a newspaper interviewer, “Anybody who’s not interested in model airplanes must have a screw loose someplace.” C.
O’D.
October 2007 WITH THE WEEKDAY WARRIORS
Well, Oregon has ceased trying to pretend that it is really some other state and has reverted to being the true Oregon: Dank, damp, and dismal. This has brought Doug McWha to the conclusion that he won't be watering the strip for nine months or so. Time to unhitch the pump and store it in the shed, then get the pipe and sprinklers up off the ground and hung on the fence. Doug put away the pump and he and Jim Corbett hung up the pipe and sprinkler heads. Your columnist had the highly technical job of feeding the cable ties through the fence for Doug to tie while Jim held the pipe in place. Notice that the ex-papermill mat is down in the pit area, the better to keep the mud from flowing over the top of your shoes. This was also a weekday operation and you'll notice that the work party has put down some mat in the pilot's boxes as well. I don't think there is any at the station in the helicopter pen. Do we just let those guys sink out of sight? More mat coming in a month or two; can they stay at least awash until then? Speaking of helicopter guys, Scott Fellman was at the field with his usual 5C-powered Raptor, but he also brought along a very large Stik. This has a ECMA 26cc gas engine which is about a 160 in real measurements. Pat Willis made the first flight without incident and Scott flew it afterward. Nov the project is to see how you set a helicopter radio to working flaps. Pat, himself, now has a helicopter to replace the one forced into retirement by that spectacular crash reported here last month. It's another Raptor, again with a 50 in the engine room, and is ex-Alan Wellentin, having been traded for Pat's Showtime Pattern ship. There is also, now, a smoke system in Pat's big Yak 54 and ft works quite well. Gene Parro's Sig Seniorita is ex-Carl Henson and came with a fiat wing, equipped with aiierons. Gene has now swapped this one for an old wing with lots of dihedral and no ailerons. He likes the way the Seniorita flies with this wing. I had thought that Frank Blain's obsession was the Excelleron, but he has brought out an Obsession 3-D which he is powering with a Saito 1.80 4-stroke. Frank says the model came with hex-head bolts so soft that they sheared off when he tightened them. I hadn't thought that such bolts were ever made in anything but the hardened variety, but models now come from far-flung, exotic places and who knows what they get up to there. The Obsession sports a little "sharkmouth" decoration on the nose. I have a photo of a sharkmouth on a Maurice Farman M.F. 11 serving with No. 2 Wing of the RNAS on the Greek island of Imbros during WWI, so that decoration has a 9O-yr. history on aeroplanes. The M.F. 11 had a nacelle for pilot and observer with a 70-hp, air-cooled Renault V-8 driving a pusher prop. The tail was held on four booms sprouting from the wings and the landing gear had four wheels and skids. Not the most warlike appearance even for a WWI plane, but the nose of that nacelle was a great place to paint a sharkmouth. If Scott Fellman, mentioned above, had an uncharacteristic model in that gas-powered Stik, Jim Corbett certainly equalled him. Jim, usually seen with a variety of electrics of all sorts of (sometimes strange) configurations, was flying a Lanier Stinger on the power of a -91 Saito the other day. He had some radio "funnies" in flight and everybody turned off. The trouble persisted, but Jim still had a measure of control and brought the Stinger to a passable landing. Careful inspection revealed, not interference, but a left aileron servo whose signal wire was making contact only when it felt like doing so. Changing servos cured it all, but I have heard rumors that the Stinger succumbed to engine failure right after takeoff in the hands of Bill Hollingsworth. Jim's also been flying another Stinger, this one electric and much smaller. In September, I spent ten days back in Central Illinois, visiting the people I worked and flew with for sixteen years. Lots of gas-burning monsters, Spectrum radios springing up like weeds, bunch of helicopter guys with both nitro and electric, a plague of ARFS – sound familiar? They were getting ready for the Thompson Cup. This is a pylon race whose object is to put in as many laps as possible in 20 minutes. One pit stop is required where the engine must be brought to a complete stop. It's run in heats with planes of equal performance flying together. Everything is raced from outright racers like Vipers to 4-Star 4Gs and even trainers. The racers don't always have it their way. Engine and starting trouble sometimes rear their ugly heads. Duane Holliger is building one of the Reno racers every year. Last year he raced Rare Bear and this year's entry is Bob Hoover's pace plane, a yellow P-51. Duane's model has a piped .40 and retracts and was going like blazes when I saw the practice runs. Seventeen minutes on a tank of fuel, too. I'm looking forward to their newsletter to see the results. Speaking of newsletters, your club is going to be looking for a new editor for next year. It has worn Bill Hollingsworth down to a frazzle. I gather that this column, produced by steam power, is a major pain to get integrated with all the electronic marvels and drives Bill, the transmitter, and Jim Corbett, the receiver, up their respective walls. You have been warned. C.
O’D.
November 2007 WITH THE WEEKDAY WARRIORS
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 transmit-ter says it’s on 27.195 mc. That’s okay; the 27 meg chan-nels are still kosher and probably as safe as any channels now that all the inane chatter from the CB radios has appar-ently 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. Jim Corbett was not only taking off from the wooden runway; he was landing on it. He had a small, electric, swept-wing bipe called a Wildfly. Not all the landings stayed on the runway, but I did see one that managed to stop before the runway ran out. The battery installation on this bird is not what could be called elegant; the battery is just strapped to the top of the cowl. It is, however, practical. Very easy to get at for charging and even sliding back and forth to make subtle changes in the balance, depending on how wild Jim wants to fly. Having mentioned cellphones as I did above somewhere, I will now impart another piece of cellphone news. You are aware, no doubt, that Doug McWha was the only one on the field classy enough to have a phone that played Mozart when it rang. Well, that phone was a couple of years old and, thus, near-prehistoric by electronic standards, so Doug traded it in for the newest thing. The new one not only does phone conversations, but also lets you send e-mail (which the recipient won’t receive) and lets others send e-mail to you (which you won’t receive). It also takes pictures which will go astray if you transmit them to another person and allows you to plug the phone into your computer (which then tells you it doesn’t know you and will you please go away). I got all this information from over-hearing bits and pieces of conversations at the field between Doug and Jim, so I may not have all the details exactly right. It does, though, sound all quite modern. And Doug has stuck with the classics; this new phone plays Rossini. I hope none of you was passionately enamored of Daylight Saving Time, because I moved the clock in the trailer back one hour. That’s what comes of me being all alone at the field, having busted my glider and with nothing else to do. Come January, Jim Corbett will be your new newsletter editor - unless he flees to the Corvallis club and asks for asylum. This column, which is produced on one of Johannes Gutenberg’s original presses, then has to be rolled up and put into the little cylinder attached to the pigeon’s leg. The pigeon then has to get all the way over to Bills house in darkest West Eugene, a trip that involves a trans-Willamette over-water flight. As of January, the poor bird has only to go up a few blocks and turn left. Should simplify things no end. C.
O’D.
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