Missed opportunity presents itself again
Jack Becker
etbjtj@broadstripe.net
Jack Becker (Port Townsend, Washington) sent in a photo of his 20-year-old Balsa USA ⅓-scale Sopwith Pup, with a special ⅓-scale pilot: 11-month-old “Flying Officer” Alden. Jack wrote:
“Alden is our ‘honorary’ grandson, which is to say when his parents moved to town, they sort of adopted us as their children’s grandparents, since their real grandparents don’t live in the local area. Miranda (Alden’s mother) felt that her children really needed local grandparents—besides which there are no surviving grandfathers, so I’m the best they’ve got! “At 11 months, Alden was able to stand up and walk around with some assistance, like leaning on my airplane (definitely made me nervous), but he was the right height at that age, so we took a chance. We happened to find the flight jacket at Costco.”
Jack noted that 23 years earlier, when he was building the airplane, he had friends who had a baby named Amelia. “I was hoping to get a picture of her, but she grew up too much in the time it took me to build it, so we missed that window.”
Jack used Replicraft drawings to adjust a few details on the Sopwith, such as the curve at the top of the rudder and the fairing because the fuselage goes from a round to a square section. Jack used vintage 1990s Futaba radio gear, and all of the flight controls are pull-pull cables per the full-scale aircraft. He converted them from metal to Kevlar because of PCM receiver interference. He later upgraded the radio to 2.4 GHz.
The Sopwith originally used a Zenoah G-62 motor for power, but the engine shook a lot, so Jack replaced it with a Laser 3.0 V-twin engine. The Laser V-twin did not have quite the performance he wanted, so it was then replaced with a DLA 64cc twin engine, which had not been flown at the time of this writing.
The airplane weighs approximately 30 pounds, “but with all that wing area, it has a wing loading of only 11 ounces per square foot, which is comparable to my Butterfly trainer.”
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