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
JETS are not too popular with the Free Flight Scale crowd. Most of us grew up with the idea that real airplanes have round engines, two wings, and drag their tails when on the ground. Somehow, the hiss of a jet never stirred our blood like the snarl of a Wright Cyclone. And the chances of getting a ride in one at the local airport were about on a par with getting a date with Betty Grable. Jets look funny with propellers on 'em. Still, ducted fan free-flights have been flown before. Some of the more successful ones were the Berkeley Skyray and a number of other ducted prop (rather than multi-bladed fan) models by a fellow named Richter who used to frequent the Sepulveda Basin in Los Angeles in the sixties. Walt Mooney even had a good-flying Tee Dee .010-powered Vigilante that sucked the air in through the top of the fuselage and ducted it out the rear.
Free Flight: Sport & Scale
"ISN'T IT a little foolish to have rules that promote lost models?" Don James asked readers in the January 1949 Model Airplane News. His thesis was that modelers could have a lot more fun if models were built to be thermal resistant. Don had just attended what was billed as "The First Western Sport Contest," put on by Joe Meckoll and the Los Angeles Thermal Thumbers. The basic rules of this contest were a three-flight total of 4 1/2 minutes, engine run between 20 and 30 seconds, all flights hand launched, and the flier with the total closest to 4 1/2 minutes was the winner.
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Thunderbolt plan: What could be more exciting than finding another plan by the great Earl Stahl, completely unknown and unpublished?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.
