Matt Carlton

Given the price of new servos now, it's hardly worth trying to buy second hand ones. Even if the seller is genuine, a friend, club mate, whatever, you don't necessarily know how old the servo is, how it was installed, whether crashed, bashed or left in an oily dusty drawer for 17 years. In moving servos around, I do wish that all the servo manufacturers would settle on a universal spline size/type/number, it would make things much simpler.

Model set up table has built in vertical posts to restrain the LE, then a bungee cord over the rear fuselage in fron of the fin to hold the tail down. Usually sufficient for smaller models. Very large/powerful models I would probably want to use a helper if I could, but my models are usually sub 60" and no more than 40 size or electric equivalent.

Well, not my finest covering job (so no zooming in please!) but I'll excuse myself as I've been off work with Covid for the last week. LS Special 02, in suitable livery, waiting for a pilot figure.

As much as I really do want to be able to support my local model shop, it can be a very frustrating experience to go in with a list of items and only find one or none of them. It is ultimately far more logical and efficient for me to find an online vendor who has everything I need in stock. That £5 p&p is not such a sting when a package of £50 of everything I need arrives at the door. We hear a lot about how we should support our local shops and of course it would be great to do so, but ultimately, spending petrol money to get to a shop which has nothing I need doesn't help either them or me, nor can I realistically afford to buy things I don't need just to put some cash in the till. Of course, I can ask for the shop to order things in, but ultimately, as much as "browsing the boards" is an absolute joy and chewing the fat with the staff is lovely, leaving empty handed feels awful, so I suspect that people just avoid it. Again, another nail in the coffin, especially for those (unlike me) for whom building is a means to an end, rather than an intrinsic part of the hobby, and a big driver in making the choice between ARTF and plan/scratch/kit.

I have to agree that you need to put a reasonable price on everything, so wood, covering, hardware etc, otherwise its a bit disingenuous, many people don't have any stocks of wood or hardware. My estimate for a similarly sized model would be: Wood = £120 Covering = £30 Undercarriage = £10 Linkages, hinges etc = £30 Glue = £10 So maybe £200 for the airframe alone, plus probably the same in motor, radio gear etc.

My biggest bug bear from a building perspective, and something that does make a substantive difference to the overall cost of a build is those "bits and bobs" which one tends to forget. Threaded rod, hinges, screws, horns, a single sheet of wood etc which are fairly cheap but come with a minimum shipping charge that is often double the item cost. Petrol prices now have a significant impact too, a round trip to my local model shop uses a gallon of unleaded at getting on for £10, which is doubly annoying if they don't have the right thing. I realise that there are a lot of forum users with apparently inexhaustible wealth, but for those on a tight budget, these things have an impact on the choices made and for a lot of people, an rtf with everything in the box avoids those issues.

Perhaps I didn't explain very well. I meant as someone looking at soneone else's build, it would be nice to be able to "like" the entire build as a whole rather than liking (as in, pressing the like button) an individual post within that thread. It's a fairly trivial thought, so probably not worth expending much thought on!

For those longer build logs, would it be possible (feasible?) to have a means of liking an entire thread rather than individually liking each individual post. It might also be a useful resource if it were possible to download completed build logs (with op permissions of course) so that they could be viewed offline as a reference? Just thinking out loud

In terms of companies ceasing to trade, I think its true to say that we have lost many more than we have gained, certainly in the arena of kit manufacturers. That said, there were quite a lot of pretty ropey kits on the market back in the 70s, 80s and 90s, lots of clones of popular designs rushed out and sold for a few months, only to disappear again,so it wasn't all sunshine. But when you think of the quite big names which have vanished or stopped producing kits, it is quite telling. What we have now are a number of large producers of mostly rtf foamy stuff and a few niche manufacturers taking advantage of the availability of cnc cutting and 3D printing to produce short kits without needing large premises, jigs, moulds and machinery, as well as being able to market and talk to/engage/sell directly to the customer online. That is a great boon to the "cottage industry" who would previously have had to find and fund distributors, advertising, promotion etc to get products into model shops and adverts into magazines, so that's one positive change.

I recently bought enough balsa to build again two models which symbolised the golden age of modelling for me (perhaps 1985-1995?) and that was at least a 50% increase in price since my last similar order in 2020. I suspect that this may well be the last time. Spending upwards of £100 on a few sheets of wood to make an average sport model is becoming difficult to justify. I'm not a luddite particularly, but I get a good 50% of my enjoyment from this hobby from crafting something in wood and for all the advances in the hobby in recent years, my ability to enjoy the hobby is reducing and I can't really see myself becoming enthused about buying or flying nothing but mass produced rtfs. So I'll make my balsa models whilst I can, keep them intact as long as I can and be sure to wear my rose tinted flying specs and when they finally bite the dust and there's no more balsa to buy, no more covering to choose and no more wire to bend, I'll sit in my armchair with my old copies of Radio Modeller and RCM&E, drink tea from a tartan thermos, sniff my last sheet of balsa and lose myself in those halcyon days gone by.

I hadn't thought about it in that way Ron. Interesting. Maybe tapping a thread into the nylon mount would work, otherwise on some mounts, fitting a nut isn't very straightforward, at least to me, as the underside of the mount arms isn't flat. Perhaps I'm being dense.

Depending on the mount, I think self tappers are fine, especially into the glass filled nylon mounts with the wedge shaped arms. The only proviso is that I try not to remove said screws once they are in. If I need to adjust anything significantly, I'd rather spend a few quid on a new mount than risk redrilling etc. Always machine screws and tee nuts or nylocs for fixing the mount to the firewall however!

I had a ball with the last one. A duff rx caused its untimely demise sadly. A different colour scheme in mind for this one, something like this:

After the sad demise of my LS Special, I thought it was time for another. Such a quick build. I don't often repeat a build, but in this case, I felt drawn to it so here we are again!

I did wonder about making a bungee from braided shirring elastic but I'm not sure how well it would work. It is quite stretchy though, I used to steal it from my mother's sewing basket in my youth to launch KK free flight gliders. With some success, it seemed at the time anyway!

? Candy Bomb Dropper!

FWIW, I had an email back from my local council confirming that there are no byelaws prohibiting flying an RC model on council owned beaches. Common sense applies of course and its worth checking with your local authority, but certainly an avenue I will be exploring out of season when a lot of the beaches around here are pretty deserted.

Excellent news, thanks David. I've been pondering a Majestic Major or possibly a Flying Quaker for a while now, so I'll have to put in a few extra shifts at the hospital!

The dihedral is fixed by the brace, so the way the wing is built, you can't really get it wrong as the centre section locks itself together and you just build the outer wings onto that "in the hand" as it were.

It's a bit of a shame that most of the FAI pure glider classes have been made somewhat obsolete by new electric alternatives. I see that the FAI have F3g as a provisional alternative to F3b. My only competition experience came right at the end of the old "Open" class with a "Selestra" right around the same time that moulded models took over and 100s became the Tracker comp!

Why else would a supposed 5p duty cut happen a couple of days before the price suddenly jumped by 15p/litre? Got to pay for the cheese and wine somehow.

Does anyone remember a kit called The Grasshopper which Cotswold (I believe) produced sometime back in the 1980s (?). FG fuselage and foam wings I think. Had one of those flashbacks to a kit review but I couldn't dig anything up online.

I found this on Ebay: Bungee Rubber Yes its a 10m maximum length but you could join lengths reasonably well. That said, if you don't mind the surgery, a small outrunner in the nose and a small capacity Lipo wouldn't add much weight and would make solo operation a lot easier. I do appreciate the purity of a "pure" glider though, but it's an option.

I think we're in danger of overanalysing this if I'm absolutely honest. If I park in a supermarket car park and put my shopping on the floor in the adjacent space, it is likely to get squashed. Yes, I could say that the driver should have looked more carefully but in all honesty, the onus is on me to put my shopping (model, child, whatever you like) in a safe position. We look both ways when we cross the road to make sure it's safe, we don't just blithely walk out and assume that the traffic will avoid us.

Very pretty. I always fancied Wik's "Charly". Love the colour scheme, makes a change from the usual. I'm suitably inspired.