Up and Around
VINTAGE STUNT Championships VI (March 25-27) marked the fifth year this largest single-following CL event has been staged at the Cholla Choppers MAC's fabulous flying site in Tucson, Arizona. We know of no other city that is so forward-thinking with its provision of flying sites. We know of one modeler who bought property and moved there after his first visit!
Up and Around
MY FIRST engine was a Super Atom, found under our Christmas tree in 1941. My fifth grade class had sold magazine subscriptions throughout the school year to earn points toward a multitude of prizes. Alas, I had come up the equivalent of $1.75 short of my choice between the Atom or a Brownie .29. In the waning of those Depression years, $1.75 could just as well have been $1,750. As mothers will, mine had arranged with the principal at my school to make up the difference. I got the little Atom to run and built an American Ace 33 for it, but at 10 years old, and in a small town, I never flew it.
Up and Around
IF YOU'RE an Old-Timer Free Flight or Control Line buff, this is your column. Whether I'm focusing on models, engines, products, or events, my goal is writing this bimonthly column is to help you have more fun with the facet of modeling you enjoy most. Technical Director Bob Underwood really got my attention with a survey that revealed that less than 10 percent of the membership entered an AMA event last year. If more than 90 percent of our members entered no events at all, why are they in AMA? Is it for the insurance alone? I don't believe that, any more than I believe that the average modeler (who apparently never enters a contest) should dismiss the value of competition.
Up and Around
AS THIS IS WRITTEN, in late March, I am still on a pretty nice high after attending the Vintage Stunt Champs III, in Tucson, Arizona on March 23rd and 24th. Should any of you doubt that there is a greater power, let me assure you there is, and he loves Stunt fliers. I arrived late the Thursday before in a driving blizzard but awoke the next three days to beautiful, windless, sunny flying weather.
Up and Around
SINCE MY MENTIONING the very peculiar reaction of Randolph dope on my more recent models, the mail received is saying that about 80% of you have had the same or a similar experience. To date no sure solution or cure has come forth, or been found. Apparently, it is founded in raw materials as they come from major chemical sources. A very interesting conversation with Mike Pratt of Sig Manufacturing reveals that they now make their own blends of dope from these raw materials. Some months ago they also had problems not unlike those described in these pages. Mike said that these problems were immediately caught and corrected within the first batch. Sig does offer totally compatible butyrate, and I intend to try it.
