Robin Colbourne

I went to a talk by Per Lindstand once in which he described his Atlantic Crossing with Richard Branson in the Virgin Atlantic Flyer. He said the air inside the 2.3 million cubic foot capacity balloon weighed the same as a Chieftain tank (around 70 tons). Even a small balloon can knock over 'buildings'...

When I was in the Scouts we made hot air balloons from tissue with either a 1/4" square balsa ring at the base. The balloon envelope was about 7ft tall and 5ft diameter at its widest point. Heat was provided by a paraffin-fired Primus stove prior to launch. Performance was marginal. On a winter's day the balloon would ascent about 150ft at best. We also made our own balloons out of dry cleaner's bags with wire base. Crossed wires held a piece of meths-soaked cotton wool at the centre of the envelope mouth. Again, performance was marginal. Too much sellotape sealing the hole where the coat hanger was meant to go in its previous life was enough to prevent flight. My suggestion would be to first make a balloon which will fly without carrying the burner, then start ballasting it up to determine what weight can be carried. Once you know the maximum, then you know the target weight your burner and fuel must not exceed. Blue flames burn much hotter than yellow ones, so try and get a plumber's or chef's gas torch to get the envelope temperature as high as possible. 'Jet flame' windproof lighters are available cheaply which give you a self contained gas cylinder and burner assembly at very low weight for flight, once the envelope is buoyant. Some sort of shroud around any flame you use is a good idea to prevent the envelope accidentally getting in the flame (speaking from experience of watching hours of work go up in smoke...).

There are a total of eight Veco 19 engine tests on the Sceptreflight Database (3/4 of the way down the list in the righthand column). The ones I have looked at suggest 30% castor oil for running in and 25% thereafter. NItromethane content seems to be anything between 0 and 25%, which may have had more to do with its availability at the time than what the engine prefers.

My work laptop pushed me into an upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11, The laptop was then unable to see the network, despite our resident IT man spending an hour working on it. Eventually I uninstalled the updated network driver and I had the network again. In a similar vein, the Ebay app on my phone has updated and is now demanding ios 17, whereas my phone won't go beyond ios 15, so I now have to use Ebay on the browser, not the app. 😖

If you hear the 633 Squadron theme tune, then the parcel is at your front door, however the drone has brought the house down on top of it...

The only model that I can find with that combination of wing tip shape, dorsal fin, rear 'window' and bolted on wing is the Super Flying Model Tri 40 II. They appear to have been available as a kit and an 'almost ready to fly' (ARTF), which may explain the non-standard colour scheme. It even has that wing joiner with the slot in it , although if you look at the RIpmax instructions for the ARTF, the tip appears to have been redisgned between the cover photo and the body of the building instructions. Kit instructions for the Tri-40 II ARTF Instructions for the Tri-40 II

A couple of MATS A aerial targets up for sale

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.