Peter Burry

According to Terry Pratchet, one in a million chances come off more often than not.  This one's only one in a thousand; almost a dead cert!

Now that will just suit me!

I've tried IC for 60 years; time for electric.

Looks good!  Let's have a go.

No luck so far!  Oh well, if at first you don't succeed, have another go!

I remember watching its aerobatic display at Farnborough in '46 or '47.  Easily the star of the show, even with the early jets there.  In particular, I remember its landing approach, done as a "Falling Leaf".  For those who don't know (and I haven't seen one recently) the Falling Leaf is a succession of incipient spins; pull the nose up to the stall, rudder to port to start the spin, recover after less than a quarter turn, repeat to starboard, and so on.  In the case of the MB5, recover from the last one and put the aircraft down on the runway.  I've never seen it done by any other high performance aircraft.  I found out later that the pilot was Zurakowski, who later invented the Meteor spin; put the aircraft into a vertical climb until virtually all speed is lost, then open up one engine so that the aircraft cartwheels down.  Now there are two challenges; a falling leaf landing for a single engine model, and a Zurakowski cartwheel for a twin engine model!

Who knows?  It could be................

I can see that I'll have to get a bigger car!

The Lysander.  A very much under-estimated aeroplane.  I remember seeing one land at Hornchurch with half its elevator hanging off.  That was in June 1940.

Let's have another try.

Count me in, please.  Don't think a Tiger ever attacked a battleship.  Tigers weren't normally carried on HM Ships, and no enemy battleship came near enough to be attacked by a shore-based Tiger.  But (as others have said) there was the D.H.82B Queen Bee radio-controlled target aircraft, which was essentially a version of the Tiger Moth with a basic structure of wood. It had the Moth Major fuselage, Tiger Moth wings and a Gipsy Major engine. The prototype was flown manually on 5 January 1935, and 380 were built subsequently.  It was certainly used in training anti-aircraft gunners on battleships. 19 Tiger Moths were converted by Jackaroo Aircraft Ltd to a 4-seat  version, with two side-by-side pairs of seats.  R5130 (the one shown on the box) was one of these, becoming G-APOV.   She crashed at Staplehurst on 3 July 1961.

Back at the Farnborough Air Display of 1946 I remember one of the best aerobatic displays I have ever seen.  It was flown by a Jan Zurakowski, later to be famous for his Meteor cartwheels.  The aircraft was the Martin-Baker MB5 as shown here  With a long nose there should be room for one of the new contra-rotating electric motors, and the wing had a sufficiently thick section to stand up to the inwards retracting undercarriage.  Or maybe go back a little further to the MB2?  Comparable performance to the Spit and Hurri, but with a fixed undercarriage, it was the first 8-gun fighter to fly.  I suppose that the ultimate in RC scale modelling has to be the De Havilland Queen Bee, a radio controlled target aircraft based on the Tiger Moth for the navy.  Or for EDF fans a Jindivik, as here?  Damn, that's four!

Always worth a try!

Gerald  I built mine according to the plan.  I'm just learning to fly, so I've crashed a few times.  The fuselage former is one piece that hasn't broken yet!  Give it time............

Just a note to Eric Bray; actually some paints can and do self combust.  Any paint using drying oils (such as linseed oil) will heat up during drying.  The usual problem is of paint rags left in a heap; the rags act as insulation to stop heat escaping, the centre of the heap heats up; the hotter it gets the faster the chemical reaction until finally the heap bursts into flame.  It's a well known phenomenon (though little to do with model aircraft).

Surrey is a big county.  Whereabouts are you?

Do you guys know that there is a Bushwhacker build thread now? Specially intended for Bushwhacker builders.

Chris In a crash (and be sure you will crash) something has to give. If you epoxy your undercarriage direct to the fuselage, then the something that gives will be the fuselage. If you fasten the undercarriage with elastic bands, then there's a fair chance that the bands will give and the fuselage stay whole.

It's not really true that dihedral corrects banking. What it does is to stop side-slip. If a model banks without turning then it will side-slip. If the model has dihedral then the effect of the side-slip is to give a greater angle of incidence to one wing than to the other, and this rolls the model back, correcting the bank. But if the model turns without banking (as in rudder-only models) then it will side-slip outwards. Now the effect of the dihedral is to give a greater angle of incidence to the wing on the outside of the turn, making the model bank towards the turn. So dihedral can either reduce or increase the angle of bank; either way, it does it to reduce side-slip. Sweep-back on wings has a similar effect. If a model with sweep-back side-slips, then the wing facing into the slip will generate more lift than the wing facing away from the slip, giving the same restoring effect as dihedral.

Here's another oldtimer (76) making a Bushwhacker. Last time I made an RC model it used Galloping Ghost (and the first time was before transistors were invented). Mine is now virtually finished, I've just got to put the framing on the "windscreen" with go-faster tape, then fasten all the bits inside. I've had them in before, but took them out while I finished off the covering. I'm using an OS40 4-stroke and the new Futaba 2.4 GHz set. Incidentally, one of the requirements of the set is that the two antennae are mounted at right-angles. I wondered how to do that while retaining an ability to remove the set, and ended up by sticking two pieces of nylon tube (snake outer) to the side wall of the fuselage. One slopes at 45 deg forward, the other at 45 deg back. When putting the radio in I just slide the antennae down into the tubes; no other fixing required. Like any other old-time builder, I couldn't resist making some minor changes. I've made a 3-section wing, with the central portion flat and dihedral on the outer sections only. I reckon that there is little restoring moment from the central portion, and it puts less strain on the dihedral braces. Incidentally, in the late 40s there was an organisation known as the Low Speed Aerodynamics Research Association (LSARA). It was run by some of the people at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, and looked at low Reynolds Number aerodynamics and model techniques. Does anyone know what happened to it?