Free Flight: Sport & Scale
ONE of my favorite quotes of all time came from a Hang Gliding newsletter published in the early days of the sport. It advised: "Never fly higher than you are willing to fall." I have always felt that this sentiment was particularly applicable to FF Scale models. You just never should put more work into a model than you are willing to see wiped out in a crash. Many models that started out to be Flying Scale never made it to the "flying" part of the game, because their owners, citing such things as an overweight model, too much wind, lack of tall grass (or other reasons) declined to validate their model's claim to full membership in the class.
Free Flight: Sport & Scale
WELL, GANG, lets make some noise! One of the problems with Rubber Scale is that they're too quiet, unless of course you happen to break a motor. Remember the ol' Megow "Motor Hum" devices? Just a little ratchet plate behind the prop with a bit of reed or bamboo could spice up your life a bit. While visiting with Bill Hannan some weeks ago, I ran across a system devised by W. Rigby (I think Wallace Rigby of paper plane fame) in England. It appears in his 1935 book Model Aircraft for Boys and is a noisemaker with a purpose,.". . warning people that it is about."
Free Flight: Sport & Scale
COLOR-XEROXED DECALS are easy to make, says Dick Drake of the Thermal Thumbers. At a recent meet, he showed me some fantastic decals that he had made up for SCAMPS members on a color Xerox machine using a Mylar self-adhering film available at blueprint shops. You can enlarge or reduce your art work to any size, perhaps cutting and pasting your original art work in several different sizes so you can use the same markings on different size models.
Free Flight: Sport & Scale
EARL STAHL's lost Thunderbolt plan: What could be more exciting than finding another plan by the great Earl Stahl, completely unknown and unpublished? Wow! Anyone who has been around Free Flight Scale very long has made a Stahl Rearwin Speedster or Waco E. Gracing the pages of magazines back before many of today's modelers were even born, Earl's classic models were good! They demanded to be built, and they were turned out by the thousands. They were designed to fly, and they did.
Free Flight: Sport & Scale
SPRING into spring(s): Modelers always seem to need springs, but the size they need never seems to be readily available. Springs do a variety of things: They hold down hatch covers, cushion landings, imitate valve springs on dummy engines, center castering tail wheels, and dozens of other useful things. Today, let's try making some of our own for those special custom installations. Most of you are aware that there are many types of springs, and that the two most common types are tension and compression. A tension spring pulls things apart, and that could be used to keep a cowling pulled down tight. A compression spring squeezes things together and is often used in landing gear struts, usually in conjunction with two nesting sizes of tubing for a sliding leg.
