Martin Dance 1

An amusing story about this model kit. I built one many years ago. It flies very well with a ST29 which is what I used. When building a kit I always read the instructions, working on the principle that you can always learn something. When building the wing nowhere is it mentioned to put the ribs in the wing! A year later I was at Sandown and spoke to the manufacturer about this. His reply was that I was the second person to notice this error. the first was the person who transl;ated the instructiions into French!

Many years ago my club used to hold the occasional indoor hot air balloon ciompetition. The most successful self propelled balloons used the aluminium tray from a tea light with some meths soaked cotton wool in it this pretty reliably gave the low weight / duratiion required for a successful flight. However a word of caution we held our meetings in an old church hall with a pitched roof (no ceiling). One particularly successful ballon reached the apex of the roof and promptly set fire to all of the cobwebs! Fortunately no harm to the building

You'll be lucky to find a source of Amyl Nitrate or Amyl Nitrite ever since those in the community discovered it as yet another illicit substance. It's a heart stimulent. I've only come across one other use of it apart as an ignition improver in diesel engines. That use was as part of the antidote kit carried if you were gassing rabbit warrens with Cymag. a cyanide based pest control powdered gas.

As a side note, many years ago I built a Ghost Rider 50 a David Boddington design. It had a very thick wing probably in excess of 20% of the chord. David advocated no wing brace or anything else. I flew it with Galloping Ghost and quickly discovered that my lack of skill flying GG an the inherent characteristics of GG did mean the wing needed some sort of wing brace 😀. Once repaired the model flew well until a 'proper' proportional radio was built and fitted to an O/D model. I guess it depends on what you choose to believe when it comes to wing joining/reinforcement of centre sections.

I don't know whether adding a second piece of carbon fire to the spar structure would be beneficial. How about adding some carbon fibre rod to the leadig edge to strengthen it for the deliberate collisions with your balsa stick round and the inevitable collisions with the limbo poles? Not to mention hitting each other.

Well I'm not on the Lincolnshire Steppes but in the middle of the UK's silicon valley with a 500 Mb fibre connection and this site is a bit flaky and slow this week.

As an afterthought and firmly locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. Did you buy rads with built in timers? If not buy a couple of time switches Using a timed programme should make your temporary solution pretty efficient.

Jon, In order to solve your heatin g problems in the short term, it seems you need to fit some form of smart controls to your existing heating system. My son has a very similar property to yours, built at about the same time as your except he has gas central heating. He has spent time and money installing smart TRV,s to his system. He now controls his heating using an app on his phone. He works partly from home and partly in an office, but with no set pattern so a simple programmer doesn't solve the problem of arriving home to a warm house. I'm not sure whethern an electric heating system is quite so amenable to the smart control solution.

Hi Jon much to agree with among the other contributors. Octopus I find are excellent, mad as a box of frogs when I met some of them at a show, but as a not for profit company they have much to reccomend them from a consumers point of view. You don't say how old your property is. My son bought what seems to be the same style of property, but it does have gas central heating, which he has worked upon with a lot of smart tech to improve its effiency. As others have remarked insulation is the key regardless of the heating system. Another downside of spray foam on the underside of ties or slates is that if you need work to be done on the roof many comopanies won't touch such roofs or they will charge you a fortune. As with many things just how long you plan to live in the property will affect choices and decisions. If your looking long term, 10 plus years, then solar panels battery storage and elctric heating might be the best option.

On the topoic of odd measurement scales. Whilst at school I would during holidaysI would track down the estate forester, (my Dad was a gamekeeper on a sporting estate) One day the forester was felling s few Beech trees, and he said how many cubic feet do you think there are in that log? I guessed, clearly wrong. So he passed me a tape measure and go said and measure it. The tape was one of those leather cased types that groundsmen and surveyors used. I pulled out the tape to be confronted with a set of divisions I'd never seen before. He explained it was a quarter girth tape, and showed me how to measure the log. Having obtained two measurements, length and girth in quarter girths he used a little booklet ready reckoner to calculate the number of cubic feet in the log.

Been out all day at Popham examining A and B tests as part of a Southern area initiative. Two observations yes wasn't the lumpers one tough aeroplane, my first radio control model Macgregor Tx and an RCM&E Cotswold tone RX, flew well once into a telegraph pole. On collecting the model the nylon covered wing looked fine, until I shook it! Today one test candidate presented with a KK Fleetwing with a OS 25. Took of from a mown grass runway and flew beutifully and so quiet. No you ndon't need excessive power to fly well.

Absolutely right, you don't even have to fly the test maneouvres in the order in which they are printed in the various documents. As far as positioning myself, as an examiner, off to oneside, it doesn't matter which and slightly behind the candidate so I can see what their fingers are doing is very helpful. Also watching them having a couple of practice flights with their instructor before the test helps you assess just how much nerves are playing a part in their performance. Often my comment is if your're being tested today and I'm on the field, you are being watched!

I suspect its the level or ferocity with which these aids operate really determine our attitude to them. I've just changed cars, from one EV to another, but that's another topic! On my previous car the lane keeping assist was quite ferocious and would pretty much take the steering wheel out of your hand, so it was turned off. On my new car the LKA is much gentler, so it stays switched on. Some aids do seem to require an act of faith. The adaptive cruise control will allow you to use it to crawl along in heavy stop start traffic, the vehicle ahead speeds up so do you, but do I entirely trust it to slow me down when the car ahead slows mmmm! maybe maybe not. The speed limit warnings seem a bit hit and miss as they seem to rely on an onboard camera seeing the limit and seeing the correct limit for the road your travelling on. Being pinged for exceeding a 20 mph limit when the road you're on is a 40mph road is just plain annoying.

To try and bring this topic back on track. I've been driving an EV for four years, pretty much to the day. The vehicle is a Hyundai Ioniq Electric. I've covered some 48.000 miles. Long term energy use is 4.8m/Kwh. It has a 38kwh battery. Range in mixed driving is 160 miles, averaged over the seasons. Its current value is around £9000. It's been charged for 99% of its use on a home charger at 7.5p Kwh. I have just replaced this car with a Cupra Born with a 77Kwh battery. So far having covered a little over 1000 miles it is averaging 4.0m/kwh. The upside to this car compared to the Ioniq is the much greater range of around 350miles. So what ? We have son who lives near Glasgow some 408 miles from my home in Reading, we haven't visited him in the last four years. The range of the Ioniq would have meant at least three recharging stops on the journey and as you neared Scotland charging points became further apart, so until last September the last charging point was Tebay services. Yes you could reach Glasgow from there but youn would be very low on charge. Since then chargers have been installed at Gretna Green thus easing the situation. So 48000 miles covered with journeys tothe coast and back without issue, visiting our other son 160miles round trip, daughter, 50miles round trip and SIL 100miles round trip. So whoever buys my Ioniq will get a car which hasn't been regularly charged at high current with a battery which shows no detectable loss of range. This generation of EV's is now hitting the used car market and look like absolute bargains provided you can charge at home or have a source of cheap charging. Why do I say this? Yesterday I charged my Born at a 150Kwh Shell recharge station I charged about 40Kwh, cost about £37.00 so about the same as petrol from the Shell garage just along the road. So buying a new EV and rapid charging it regularly makes EV ownership very expensive. So a used 2nd generation EV charged at home is very cheap motoring.

I would take any data or statistics coming from the motor trade with a pinch of salt. It is a business wherenitnnever rains but it pours! As an example of the curious and self centred attitude of the motor trade consider our vehicle number plates. In the days of three digit and three numbers plates the plates were unchangedin decades. Whnen we stated using seven character plates eg: ABC 123 A, the new reg started on the 1st January and lasted a year. This didn't suit the motor trade because no one buys new cars in the winter so a change of registration happened on the 1stAug. This also quite quickly didn't suit the motor trade because this was during the holiday period and vehicles were apparently in short supply to satisfy the 'new' reg market. The solution was to have two new registration letters per year in March and September, thus using up the available registrations at twice the speed of the earlier system. All to satisfy the motor trade. So a business that manufactures facts/data to satisfy its own ends. I wouldn't believe a word of anything coming out of that business.