Robin Colbourne

payneib, you forgot to add that their solution to all such situations is, 'Buy more guns'. 😀

Bonzo Moon, that is certainly an impressive achievement, not least for being able to achieve continuous flight within the space available and without hitting obstructions. There are a few people who would have taken exception to your claim of the first quadplane though. Matthew Bacon Sellers Jr. built the first successful quadraplane in 1908, capable of flying on 5hp after development. Frederick Koolhoven, the famous Dutch designer, Designed the Armstrong Whitworth FK10 fighter in 1916. Noel Pemberton Billing the Supermarine founder and Member of Parliment designed the incongruous Zeppelin hunter, the Supermarine Nighthawk, which just goes to prove that every aircraft in Dastardly and Muttley has existed for real at some point.

There's always the possibility that the constituent parts of one of the ingredients has been changed, usually for environmental reasons, and not relayed on to the customer (fuel blender in this case). I've come across this sort of thing a number of times in the the day job. The other possibilty is that some fluid that was around or being used by the Richard when cleaning or rebuilding the engine had an effect. Thread locking fluids, for example, can casue all sorts of damage to plastic and rubber parts.

Better to buy a good used vice than a cheap new one. Record vices are perhaps the best known, however there are many other good quality brands such as Paramo, Rededa, Woden and Parkinson. Once you reach 4 inch jaws it is well worth having a quick release vice to save time. If a quick release vice doesn't tighten but just clicks, it is a simple matter to remove the split pin on the mechanis and tighten a turn on the sprung ratchet. For smaller work, I like to have a smaller vice, e.g. Record No.1, mounted on a block of wood clamped in the jaws of the larger vice. It also raises the work piece up so I'm not bending down so much. Facebook Marketplace and Ebay are probably the best places to find the older vices. Here is my Record No. 1 vice (which looked a lot tattier than it does now, when I bought it) in a Record No.23 quick release vice I bought for a colleague, who cleaned it up and repainted it.

This image from a Canadian forum shows the Centre of gravity just above the leading edge of the lower wing:

Ebay Facebook Marketplace B-M-F-A Sales Group on Facebook There are many other similar ones. Also keep an eye open for club auctions and bring and buy sales. With the increasing age of R/C fliers there are a lot of secondhand models that go for peanuts. It is very common to find that the model will require some work before it can really be considered airworty, so bear this in mind. Martin Thompson buys and sells models. He has recently introduced a scoring system for the quality of those he is selling via Inwood Models. A Plane Olde Bargain is another source. They are tucked away in Old Leake, Lincolnshire, which way over behind the back of beyond (beyond the black stump is much, much closer), so a bit of a trek from the main centres of habitation, however they do have a stall at the major shows in the summer.

Thermic edition? I thought that was the std version?

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.

The ' least-liked engines' thread got me thinking about why we have o-rings on needle valves. The leaky o-ring seems to be the Achilles heel on so many engines, that I wonder why they are there and so widely adopted, given that engines seemed to work perfectly well before o-ring needles were introduced somewhere in the late 80s/early 90s. Was the cost of producing a needle and spray bar that doesn't leak without an o-ring prohibitively expensive or was it something else?

JD8, your SNJ must be virtually unique for an engine powered R/C model. The prop actually looks larger diameter in proporting to the airframe than on the real thing. The AT-6, SNJ, Harvard family was notorious for the noise from its relatively small propeller though. With regard to the original question, the DC Bantam glow engine is probably my least favourite, having wasted several hours trying to get some in my friend's Ebenezers going at a recent free flight event, then when I finally coaxed some live out of one it didn't have the power to keep the attached model airborne. I've never had a lot of luck with Irvine 40s, they either have gummed rings or are just worn out by the time I see them. Strangely enough given the comments from others, I've had a fair amount of success with a Flash 35 I bought recently, purely out of curiosity. Ok, the crankshaft bushing leaked a bit, but I had no problem getting the thing started. I might even put in an MFA Yamamoto just for the hell of it. A G-Mark 06 is another engine I just could not get going, again it seemed deficient in the compression department.

The capacity of glow starters and r/c batteries is such that you can charge them relatively quickly, so you make a decision to go out flying on a marginal day in the small window the weather allows. If you are charging big propulsion batteries for a large electric model it requires more planning and you then need to discharge the ones you don't use. There is also the matter of the buzz one gets from starting and tuning an engine, or am I alone in that? 😊