Southwest Aeromodeling Conference
The Southwest Aeromodeling Conference was held May 17-19 in Arlington, Texas, featuring over 100 booths, seminars, indoor flying, and a Modelers' Choice competition.
Randy's Dime
IT'S ONLY FAIR to warn you. An RC sport trainer as versatile and economical as this one can be habit-forming. Dime suits just about any mood. Take it up for slow flight, just puttering around clipping weeds and doing endless touch-and-goes, or go for tearing up the sky with reckless abandon-all on a small fuel budget.
Mounting Wheels
MODELERS who like to do things right know that probably the most secure method of attaching a wheel to a wire axle is by soldering metal washers to both sides of the wheel. The only hitch is that solderable metal washers with the proper size hole in the center can be difficult to find. The following photo essay shows how to avoid that problem by custom-making your own metal washers. This technique can be used with wire axles of any size.
Keytwo
Easy to build and great fun in the air, this little RC sportster is an enlarged version of an original 12-year-old design. It's designed around modern .20 to .25 size two- or four-stroke engines and has a much-improved flight envelope. Over a decade ago I had a good deal of success with a model called Paskey that I published in Model Builder magazine. The airplane enjoyed some popularity, and quite a few were built and flown. In a spectacular tour de force that's still remembered today, Eddie Williams performed a "drunk pilot" routine with one of the earlier Paskeys at a Southwestern Model Airplane Championship contest. Hidden in the pit area, Eddie wowed the audience with stalls, inside and outside loops, and upright and inverted snaps and spins - all at very low altitude. It was a heart-stopper. Though the booze-logged, make-believe pilot got all the credit, Eddie's flying was magnificent.
What's in the Box?
This piece is not intended to make anyone become an electronic technician; it offers some insight into the things that go inside the boxes we call transmitters and receivers. Failure of our equipment is rarely caused by a failure of one of the basic parts. More often than not, the cause is cell failure in a battery pack or a broken connection in the exterior wiring. Those are the weakest links in our systems-not all those little pieces on the inside! Let's take a closer look at what's in the box.
