Robin Colbourne

Raymond, as Martin has said, the airframe itself is not likely to be particularly valuable. Your best bet is to advertise it in the Surrey/Berkshire area and hope there is someone who learned to fly on a BobCat that wants to buy it for nostalgic reasons. Before advertising that you will post it, check the cost of doing so. Once a parcel gets over 120cm the delivery price can be prohibitive. Here's a BobCat in the foreground that was brought along to the model flying course I ran at Tomlinscote School, Frimley in the mid-90s.

My thoughts are that this reads like a hacked account, or at best, you have misread the audience. The cars you list are so diverse so few here would have an opinion. The concern of most modellers that I know is, "Will my wing fit in this car and will glow fuel stain the upholstery?" . Try Pistonheads/Car buying and Pistonheads/finance

The Graces do seem to be a family with more than their fair share of untimely ends. Even so, I doubt any of them would have swapped their experiences for a long, dull life and dying of old age.

The shape and colour scheme matches the 'Flying Cat 90' a 60" ARF pusher that Nitroplanes used to sell:

That is really quite an achievement to make an engine that self destructs in the box. Was it magnesium in some sort of corrosive packaging?

Martin, you offloaded a DC Bantam in return for an Elfin 2.49? Do you still feel the pangs of guilt for doing that to the poor recipient? 🤣 With regard to your aquatic adventure, my Ebenezer flying friend still recounts how, one frosty Christmas Day afternoon, his Ebenezer Fokker D7 landed in the middle of Frensham Great Pond. My father went home, collected our small inflatable dinghy, and paddled out as it was getting dark to retrieve the thing. Maybe Bantams have an affinity to water?

There are photos of the stripes being applied with a broom. The only way to get it right is to find pictures ofthe actual aircraft in question. If it was actually in service on D-Day, they are likley to be pretty ragged, whereas an aircraft that had them applied at the factory may well have been masked up and done more neatly. This warhistoryonline website gives quite a few invasion stripe examples.

We had George from 4Max give a talk to our club the other day. He made a good point that if an ESC burns out in flight, which they do on occasions, if the receiver is powered from it, you may also lose flight controls, whereas if you use a separate UBEC, you will still be able to control the model, so at least have the opportunity to do a controlled dead stick landing.

Grumpy Gnome, exactly this. When I was at school, the number of children with single or divorced parents was very, very low. Now it is possibly more common than a mother and father living together with their own children. The number of boys (because, like it or lump it, our hobby appeals primarily to males) living with a full-time father figure (who might take an interest in the hobby himself) is diminishing all the time. Parents are having to juggle their time between their other children, stepchildren and a myriad of other calls on their time, so the idea of spending a large chunk of their daylight weekend hours standing around at a flying field waiting for little Johnny to get a few minutes of an instructor's time, is unlikely to happen. If the child is really obsessed about model flying, then a flight simulator and a gyro-stabilised electric model they can fly by themselves in a local park will seem like a wise purchase.

Could it be that the 30 to 40 year olds are either spending time with their families, working overtime to pay for their families, because of their family don't have the surplus funds to spend on hobbies, or if they don't have families are off doing more physical, energetic activities whilst their bodies will allow them to do so? From what I've seen, there are plenty of younger people using R/C equipment, the larger proportion of them just don't choose to do so in the traditional club environment. Whilst I agree that clubs should encourage new members of all ages, the retirees are the ones with the time, money and space to build and fly the sort of models that get flown at club sites. With regard to the stock that wholesalers and shops have, the story was no different in the early 2000s when I worked part time in a model shop. Unless it was a new offering, the distributors only imported what they had already sold to shops, and even then you could find that the manufacturer had not made another batch of that item in time for the container leaving China or wherever, so you still didn't get it. Flying Daddy, I wish you all the best with your knee op, and hope you have a speedy recovery. As Chris Walby says, get that simulator earning its keep and amaze the guys at the field when you eventually get back there!

The October issue of our local free newspaper, 'The Ems', arrived through the letterbox today, and much to my surprise, they printed all three of the photos that I submitted with the article. It appears that they didn't edit the text down at all, so it still made as much (or as little...) sense as when i sent it in. Perhaps that was because I did make a point of sticking to the 300 word limit that they requested.

The SC400 is £1312.49 on the Model Shop Leeds webpage. It says 'special order' though, so one can only hope the price holds until you actually have your hands on one.

MDS weren't helped by being supplied with the needle out of the spraybar and the carb off the engine. Generally the needle would be wound in dry on the model shop counter, often shaving lumps off the outer diameter on the less than perfect surface in the mating surface of the spraybar. Add to that the o-ring which was meant to be seated at the bottom of the carburettor spigot that went in the mating hole in the fronnt housing. Frequently the o-ring was stretched over the spigot so it sat visible between the housing and carb barrel housing. This allowed air to leak in around the pinch bolt, thus messing up all carb settings. If MDS or Ripmax had only assembled the engine completely before thrusting it into the hands of, usually, beginners, many of these engines might have actually run ok. You only need to run an OS 35FP or 40FP to see what a beginner's engine should be like. My 35FP generally starts first flick and holds its settings from one day to the next. Not an o-ring in sight!

Engine Doctor, that's exactly the conclusion I reached. If only I could convince my 90 year old friend to convert his fleet to DC Wasps or Cox 049s my life would be so much easier. Personally I would probably stick DC Merlins in them all, given the price of glow plugs these days. He is mostly blind and not that quick on his feet, so I do the starting and chasing. Someone at the recent Free Flight Meeting at RAF Odiham pointed out that the age differential between the model owner and the fetchermite is still the same as in the old days, its just that they're both fifty years older!

I reckon leccyflyer's got it.