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Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd Break into a distillery...... Daffy says to Elmer, "Is this whiskey?" Elmer replies, "Yeth, but not as whiskey as wobbing a bank."

Jon has put his finger on the issue (with apologies to shelf stackers) stackers work to the nearest pallet size, engineers to microns as well as in Jon case designing testing and marketing the product. Anyone with engineering expertise for the last 40years has been under valued and denigrated. The majority of who work for small firms are indeed paid less than supermarket stackers. Yet without their skills the mass produced products would not have appeared on the shelves. In the past Britain was made great by engineers not stackers.

Don, its not so much that i dont think our engines are worth a fair price and match our competition for quality etc. Its more that prices for our competition, OS especially, are insane. They want £425 for a 70 and i cant see any justification for that. if my understanding of the OS sales figures are anything to go by, the punters agree. We can justify being cheaper than our competition on the one hand as we sell direct to customers and cut out at least one distributor and shipping all the way from Japan, so £300 for our 70? Perhaps it is not so unreasonable. The other thorny issue which impacts my view of the prices is I cant afford to buy them. With my wages, if i was a customer working somewhere else for the same money i couldnt afford to buy a laser engine, at least not more than a few. Its an absolute disgrace, but that is the reality. Financially, i would be better off working at tesco stacking the shelves and putting engines prices up will not help me in the slightest. All it will do is put the product further out of reach. Perhaps the engines are not the only product being under valued and 2 staff members voted with their feet in the last 6 months.

Here are some photos of the German Eurofighter in special markings for their Asian deployment. Pitch Black is an air defence exercise held in Darwin every 2 years. It draws participants from around the world. An open day is held for the public to get up close to the aircraft.

My very early 75, bought 25 years ago as a non runner, (timing out after a bearing change by previous owner, for £40) still trundles about in my DVII, thank you very much. Same bearings and all.

More of the F2

Indian Flanker.

Why isn't there a <groan> icon for jokes like this? 😆 -- Pete

Yes James be careful when it is wet it tears easily.

Japanese F2

I'm just a little disappointed that a praiseworthy co-operative venture, which may in due course affect the future of our sport, was not deemed worthy of at least a mention in the News section of the BMFA Website or Facebook page (like the BGA did). I'm sure it would have been of interest to at least some of the Membership.

As I’ve already got my ticket I’ll make a flying decision on the day but I do like a challenge!

Hi Dale. Sorry to hear about the problems you have with your Sagitta, I can't help you with weight reduction, but from what you describe the climb out sounds normal. I have a couple of electric gliders and neither have any downthrust but climb up very steep, almost vertical which is what I want them to do. The motor is just to gain height then after shutting down the motor I soar around trying to find thermals, usually in vain.

Good morning James, I bought the 1/16" depron from Slec at a show just before covid struck, it was the last they had as manufacture had ceased, I wanted 3mm but that had all gone. When covering with brown paper on foam I use a temp. controlled iron set to 120 deg. on foam surfaces and 140 on balsa. The best brown paper to use I have found is the masking paper from Toolstation, 300mm x 54m for under £4. Paint the mat side with thinned PVA and iron on, don't use strong B.P. as it generally is ribbed and these show when dry. Eric.

1930 Boeing P-12

Looks like you are right Martin thanks. http://pibs.nats.co.uk/operational/pibs/pib6.shtml 514259N 0001541W is near Colney Herts. Even so, it would have been good to know!.

Seen on fb

The only advantage I can see of petrol engines is that they run cleaner than glow engines. That and the fact that they are currently being producing in large quantities at the sizes suitable for large model aeroplanes. It will not be too long before these manufacturers start to disappear. Mainly due to electric motors becoming more and more prevailing in the mid-sized power tool market. Eventually "small" ic engines will fall into the hobby market category and companies producing low volume quality products will thrive when the high volume producers have long since lost interest. However that will also have an impact on price, but as I keep telling people. The days of "cheap" are now over and prices will revert to a level that they were before the days of the "baby boomers" My advice is to order your Laser engines now whilst they are "cheap as chips" Unfortunately most of them now are too big for the size of models I can fly at our (small) field. So now Jon is going to be under pressure from me to to make smaller engines (40 - 50 size 4 stroke please).

My ME109 is at the painting stage now and hopefully will be finished this week so i am looking at my next project which will be a Yokosuka floatplane, i already have a small free flight version which i acquired several years ago as you see in the picture. I have a pair of foam floats which i got nice and cheap at a bring and buy and using the dimensions from the free flight model against the floats i have it would put the r/c model at 46" wingspan. The float to aircraft strutery will have to be wire i guess and i am thinking of using lightply formers where the struts go in to the airframe and the drilling and binding with cotton/epoxy to secure them. The nose of the floats will be cut on the underside and fitted with thin ply wheels with only the lower 3rd showing to hopefully enable it to take off on grass, if i can keep the model light enough by using mostly depron hopefully that will be possible. Any thoughts/advice/encouragement welcomed! I will of course do a build thread, am heading off to `The Works` tomorrow to pick up a roll of drawing paper to pen up the plans for the model to use as patterns.

I've made a huge use of your excellent build log Dwain at all stages of the build. In the end, I made the fairings by building up from layers of 3mm balsa sheet and then carving and sending to shape. It's worked out OK. I'm building the wing struts at the moment and have followed the same route as you, i.e. piano wire with clevis ends. The only difference is that rather than add balsa profile to the wire I've used some of the K & S streamline aluminium tube. Construction of the model is almost done now, with priming and painting left to do as I glassed the fuselage rather than covered.

I agree with most of your points kevin but the issue is cost. I can make a 60 flat twin, but its would cost the same as a 160 as it costs the same to make it. People wont pay over 500 quid for a 60. Also our engines are a bit like lego with many common parts. Its a strength in many ways, but a significant weakness in others as any new engines need to use existing parts to get them over the line with the management. New parts are generally frowned upon and this is why the flat twins have got the green light as only 2 new parts were needed. The radial needs...10? 12? something like that. anyway if the engine uses its own parts and those parts are bespoke for that engine, the engine using it becomes more expensive as you loose the economy of scale when producing say 30 of a cam vs 300.

No pics of build, but this is from May 2020: @Timo Starkloff's Yak-9. I took a liberty with the canopy which I fashioned from a Lidl washing up bottle, hardly scale, but never mind, it could easily enough be replaced if I so wished! Finished AUW including 2200mah 3S is 811g. I hope to test fly tomorrow. Oh I added a rudder so it has one extra control surface compared to the plan, and I used two servo's for the aileron, but then it's leccy, so one less as no throttle servo needed.

No pawls or ratchets, these are used a lot in model helicopters for autorotation freewheels.

Posted by Roger Jones 3 on 03/01/2021 06:20:10: We and the BMFA should have had nothing to do with them and their place is in camera magazines, not model plane magazines.   Sticking one's head in the sand never solves anything. A lot of kids are going to have their first experience of remote flying with quads, and if the model flying community as a whole adopted a more positive and inclusive attitude, then those kids may very well go on to be club members who fly planes and helis. Who knows, they may even move on from foam ARTF to balsa kit and plan builds... But with the prevailing attitude of modeller NIMBYism, blaming all your perceived woes on a minority of fliers and continued deliberate misunderstanding of the purpose of the ANO changes (monetising airspace below 400' ) it will not happen. Edited By Lima Hotel Foxtrot on 03/01/2021 10:31:06