Free Flight: Sport and Scale
Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season. It is hard to believe that 1999 is here, and 2000 is just around the corner! This is my first column since Bill Warner's retirement, and I had promised a follow-up to the pendulum. However, because of time constraints and the holidays, I was unable to get the work done that I needed to in order to make the construction of the pendulum a much-easier task. I am building a Sopwith Camel. The fuselage is framed, and it will have a pendulum. As I assemble different parts to the system, I plan to photograph them so you can see how the pendulum is made and installed. I will definitely have this done for the next column.
Flying Aces NATS
Mecca! According to the American Heritage Dictionary, a mecca is a place regarded as a goal. To me, it's the Flying Aces Club (FAC) Nationals (Nats)! This wondrous event is held every two years, and this year it took place July 16-19. The first FAC Nats was in 1978 at Willow Grove Naval Air Station in Pennsylvania. The idea was for certain active clubs to take on the responsibility of finding a suitable location for the contest every other year. It has been held at Dayton, Ohio (on the site of the Air Force Museum), Utica, Michigan (at the flying on the grounds of the old Ford test track), and twice at the Willow Grove site.
Free Flight: Sport and Scale
A variety of pendulums can be used for more spiral stability in model airplanes. I'll give a little background on pendulums, and share where I got most of my knowledge and experience with them. Those who have been in modeling for as long as I have, 50+ years (yeow!) might remember a well-known British modeler, P.E. Norman. He was truly an exponent of the pendulum, and used it to make his models to aerobatics. Spectators would stand back and marvel at how well his Scale subjects flew. This early pendulumn consisted of a hanging weight that swung left or right for rudder control, back and forth for elevator control, or sometimes both directions, giving rudder and elevator control.
Free Flight: Sport and Scale
More thoughts on balsa sheeting: I notice that many Free Flight (FF) model airplane designers seem to shy away from sheeting-particularly in Scale - mostly because of a weight constraint. I prefer the realism that sheeting provides, despite the slight weight gain. After choosing the right balsa for sheeting, the increased weight is so negligible that you might wonder why you didn't do it before! How about an all-balsa fuselage? Many subjects only look good if the whole fuselage is sheeted. You Rubber types might think that I've lost it, for sure; I don't suggest that you build a Peanut model this way, but it should be considered for a larger Rubber model. Certainly, if you like power FF as much as I do, do it if the subject warrants it! What I want to show you here is how to do it easily.
Free Flight: Sport and Scale
I'm going to discuss a couple areas of construction that I hope you will find informative and useful. The first involves sheeting on a fuselage to represent the metal on the full-size aircraft. Often on a smaller Rubber scale model, stringers are used instead of sheeting, which doesn't look nearly as good. The other option (seen frequently) is to use stringers with balsa sandwiched between them à la Guillow. This, in my opinion, is the least desirable; a smooth contour is virtually impossible because of all of the glue joints! The glue, being harder than the balsa, doesn't allow for uniform sanding. I know that some glues sand pretty well, but the problem still exists.
