leccyflyer

Glow fuel will be around for a long time, provided there is a market for it.

Bad luck Toto but, to be fair the forecast for this weekend is pretty grim anyway - it's been snowing and raining here all day and the winds and rain forecast for the weekend makes any flying unlikely.

Yes - it's possible to get an unbalanced pack from just about any brand. That's why it is vital to check individual cell voltages as soon as the pack arrives. The key thing then is what will the supplier do about it. Some suppliers will advise that you cycle the pack with a few charge /discharge cycles to see if it settles down. Frankly I'm not keen on that at all, as such cycling is just eating the lipo packs supply of lives and I expect them to arrive in good order. My favourite HRB and Zeee Power packs delivered through Amazon are good as gold and any problem is dealt with immediately with either full or partial credit, or return.

Zeee Power https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zeee-4000mAh-Battery-Airplane-Helicopter/dp/B089YNLCVG

Doesn't have to be an expensive headlight bulb Chris, any old 12v -24v bulb will do the job.

When any lipo has reached the end of it's useful life they are discharged overnight, outdoors, using a car headlight bulb to which I've soldered 4mm gold connectors on short fly leads. With the pack dead, the voltage is checked through the balance leads, before the leads are clipped close to the case, have a small wrap of tape or a cm of heatshrink over their ends. The inert lipo then goes to the battery box at the municipal recycling centre and the leads go into my scrap wire drawer for recycling of the wire and connectors.

Personally I usually use a pair of magnets and they are held in place by epoxy. It doesn't hurt to put a smear of epoxy across the surface of the magnet to lock it into the structure, however, sometimes, the pull can be too strong and they pull out. On some occasions I've made use of a steel washer in lieu of a second magnet. You can make good use of the magnets from inside a wrecked motor, if you liberate them, which have the advantage of being rectangular in plan view and so can be neatly stuck onto the corner of the hatch, with a fillet of epoxy and microballoons to hold them in place.

Got a few of those marvellous BEFA stickers on some of my models that have been around since before the Millennium Bash and, for me, it was the golden age of electric flight with all of those low key, very enjoyable fly-ins around the country. There was a relatively small band of electric flyers successfully having fun with a range of models and meeting the challenges to getting good performance from limited kit before e-flight became mainstream. Met a lot of really good modellers at that time and the free exchange of ideas plus those fly-ins made for a proper e-flight community. The wee yellow BEFA newsletter was crammed with informative and innovative articles and everyone at the fly-ins was so willing to share. Seeing what my fellow modellers were achieving with simple brushed motors and banks of home-made NiCds was an inspiration at the time. It made it a very easy decision to switch to e-flight. Happy days. 😎

Don't think they are at Aston Villa - aren't they at the Emptihad?

It sort of feels like we have been rained off and hardly flying at all this year, but on checking and comparing with last year, I find that logged my 101st flight of the year on Sunday, compared to 118 flights in the same period last year.

Your Blackhorse Stuka looks ace Chris. What set-up are you using in it?

One other aspect which hasn't really been addressed it that there does seem to be a bit of a nostalgic uptick in the use of small diesel engines, though I accept that could conceivably just be my perception since I'm noticing them more, having brought a few back into use. However there's certainly a number of FB groups dedicated to vintage diesel usage. I've kept a very small number of glow engines, for purely sentimental reasons, but now have more small diesels than glows and a sum total of about half a dozen small engines. The fuel is ruinously expensive and they are undoubtedly messy, but I'm hoping to have my first diesel powered flights later in the spring when the weather improves a bit- since I'm far too nesh to be bothering with diesels in the freezing cold of winter.

Ah, okay - I thought that you meant that they had just run out of a particular colour. They obviously can't keep up with the rate that you are turning the aeroplanes out Eric. 👍

B and Q will never run out of sample pots if you take something in to be scanned. Those are then bespoke colours which you can save to your profile. I'm getting towards the bottom of my sample pot of Sky Type S, which has provided for several models in the past few years.

Is that clockwork? Those folks at Dacia really need to work harder on naming their vehicles. Their budget SUV is the Duster and you see quite a few of them knocking around Aberdeen, where the name has very unfortunate connotations, translating to an unsuccessful " dry hole" or essentially a dud.

All viz is pretty bad - the cockpit tub was so cramped the engine instruments were on the nacelle.

One of these GG?

Murat - no doubt you will have received the HR training at some time, which will have described such attributes as being those of a Completer/Finisher. 😎

Didn't have any photos on Sunday, but my pal Steve did take some whilst I was flying, which I received last night, so here's a couple, featuring the remaiden of my wee 18" span VMC Hurricane and Durafly P-51. I particularly like the one of my P-51D Candyman, with John's homebrewed F-82 Twin Mustang in the background. The post processing is very evocative of contemporary grainy colour slide film from the 1940's, so looks like some of the rare colour footage of the time that I have in print.

No Operator ID anywhere? If you are on a farm you might anticipate the owner coming to claim the drone, assuming that they know roughly where it came down. You absolutely did the right thing pulling the battery IMO -as you said, you don't want it attempting to lift off inside your house.

No problem Richard. 1. Mossie, as described above, dolly launch, belly land, nae flaps, 64" span and I'd be happy to rig such a beauty at the field. >>> 2. Hellcat, 55'60" ish, dolly launch, belly land 3. P-47 Thunderbolt, Razorback, 55-60" ish, dolly launch, belly land, postscript retract option, like the FW190 intention?

It's just part of life's rich pageant and different personalities. I have modelling pals who will only ever have one model under construction at one time. The have the discipline to methodically work through completion of that model in a linear fashion and that sort of order fits with their personality. I have other modelling pals who operate on more of a parallel processing style approach and will have more than one model on the go at a time, at various stages in the process. I'd estimate the latter type forms the majority. A lot of modellers really enjoy the building part, where results are often very rapid, starting with a box of wood and quickly progressing to something tangible in a short time. It's the exciting bot for them and you can soon arrive at a model that is 90% completed, with just the 80% left to do to finish it. Quite a few don't like the covering and finishing stages anywhere near as much and the temptation is to put that to one side and move onto another model for their favourite bit. It's a hobby, not a job, so that is perfectly acceptable. Then there are those - myself included - who find the greatest joy in the research, seeking out, selecting and kicking off new ideas and the pesky real world parts of putting that into tangible form is to be transcended in order to achieve an end result. These are essentially dreamers and will often have multiple projects on the go, quite often leading to project inertia where lots of projects are stalled for the sake of a few hours work or a minor tweak. To give an example, I have a wee foamie Me163 that I bought the "kit" about 25 years ago, finished it bar the painting within a couple of years, but which has been sitting pending just adding some markings for about 20 years. I finished that last year, but I still haven't flown it. My Balsacraft Hurricane has been sitting, repaired, awaiting some tape stringers for the rear fuselage for more than 20 years, but is now at the point of just needing some panel lines and weathering, having recently done the stringers and moved on to painting. Add to that a tendency to see benefit in taking on other folks uncompleted projects and that's how you can end up with dozens of works in progress, some of which stay in that state for years. However, it's a hobby, not a job and provided that you are comfortable with that and enjoying what you are doing, it shouldn't be a problem. Such a situation would be viewed as catastrophic and stressful by the chap who must have one project on the go at one time, but we are all different and that's fine. So try not to beat yourself up for starting another model before you've finished the last one - in the end it's a hobby, a pastime and a passion and we can all enjoy it in our different ways.

At a recent swap meet there was a table of small glow engines for sale, for a pound each, including a little run Enya 25 in very clean condition, a beautiful piece of engineering. You literally couldn't give them away, though I've actually given away quite a few engines in the past few years. There are still loads of glow engines out there, if they never made another one there would still be sufficient to meet the likely demand. Better that they get used, rather than languishing in engine collections or worse still abandoned in a box under the bench, but TBH the demand doesn't seem to be huge, as electric is so much more accessible, easy to use and effective. In the size range that glow engines tend to inhabit then it's become perfectly clear that good electric solutions are readily available to do that job. It is only in the larger sizes, where petrol engines take over that electric propulsion becomes more challenging.

Andy is referring to his own club test in order to allow solo flight.