Great Grape Gathering and other events
The Great Grape Gathering is a long-running annual Free Flight (FF) contest scheduled this year on September 9-11. It will again be held at the National Warplane Museum Airfield in Geneseo, New York.
The Great Grape Gathering name is derived from the fact that, along with flying, it’s also a social gathering where food and wine round out the contest. It was described in detail in my June 2013 “Old-Timers” column.
Most of the events center on Nostalgia, Classic, and Old-Timer (OT) competition. Gas, diesel, rubber power, electric, and gliders are featured, along with some modern FF aircraft. Society of Antique Modeler (SAM), AMA, and Flying Aces Club (FAC) activities are all represented.
Approximately 40 events are listed throughout the three-day contest, so
there’s probably a category for nearly every aircraft in your hangar. Check the Old Wakefields website, listed in “Sources,” for more information. A link to the event flyer in PDF format is also on the website.
You’ll have to actually attend to learn whether they take off their shoes and crush grapes.
Electric Power Events
Electric power continues to ease into both modern and OT FF. An E-20 FF event will be featured for the first time at the Great Grape Gathering and other events that are held at the National Warplane Museum Airfield.
E-20 stands for the 20-inch maximum wingspan and 20-second motor run. I don’t see the event in the AMA Competitions Regulations, so it must be a reduced-size version of the E-36 event for 36-inch wingspan models.
A few years ago, electric fliers were pleading for inclusion into the exclusively liquid-fueled gatherings. At
first they sought some formula that would allow head-to-head competition between electric-powered and fuel-powered aircraft. Eventually, they developed their own E classes and everyone is now satisfied to share the field at an event.
Electrics have progressed to the point where a few of us who (mostly) fly wet engines now look with envy at some of the successful events designed for electric power only. An example is the series of One-Design electric-powered RC fun-fly aircraft that draws good attendance for California SAM Chapters 21 and 27.
The chapters have progressed from the Simplex and Benny Boxcar to the San Jose design for 2016. Each time, they make a group kit order for a special price and have a good turnout of builders and attendees. Now some of us are saying, “Hey fellas, couldn’t some puny little, old, cross-scavenged glow engine be allowed in?”
Goodbye Resistor
That pesky little resistor finally disappeared from the high-tension spark lead on my latest OT RC airplane. For years, the standard installation for running a spark-ignition engine in an RC aircraft required adding a 10K ohm resistor in the wire between the coil and spark plug. Its purpose was to eliminate
radio frequency interference noise from the ignition system.
Without that in-line resistor, most airplanes would see interference so bad that they couldn’t safely be flown. Those resistors are a frequent failure point in an ignition system. Some people use small, ½-watt resistors for a neater-looking installation, but they often aren’t up to the task. A 1-watt resistor isn’t that much bulkier, but it has longer life.
The 2.4 GHz radios have allowed this latest installation improvement. OT fliers sometimes disdain modern technical advances, but in this case it makes the installation look more authentic. That little bulge in the ignition wire didn’t exist on original FF airplanes.
I’ve been using smaller resistor values (4.7K ohm) for some time with the newer radios, but only after testing via engine-running range checks. During this latest test, I still had slight servo jittering when using no resistor, but after separating the ignition and receiver batteries by a couple of inches, the problem disappeared. I now have 20 or more flights on the airplane.
I haven’t heard of anyone else flying an old spark-ignition airplane without that resistor, but I assume others are doing so. This has worked for me, but I can’t guarantee it will work in every airplane with every radio.
Don’t fly without first conducting a successful ground-range test with the engine running. ✈
SOURCES:
Old Wakefields/Great Grape Gathering
www.oldwakefields.com/5252.html
