Robin Colbourne

If you keep an eye on Facebook Marketplace and Ebay, there are often people selling random collections of wings or fuselages. This example in Stoke on Trent has three of the same type of fuselage as yours, so may well have a wing that would fit: R/C Glider wing and fuselage assortment

The American manufacturer, Kraft Radio Control, were making transmitters with a single stick which had a top that was twisted for rudder control, back in the 1960s. Here is a more modern conversion: Single stick transmitter conversion

Which is the nearest Lidl to Hatton Garden in London? Asking for a friend... 😄

The Digital Hot Air Gun is probably the best thing they sell. Its ideal for covering and covering repairs as you can set it to a temperature you know won't be to much for the material with which you are working. It makes a great companion to a Prolux digital covering iron (sadly Lidl don't do these!). I was using the Lidl cordless multitool at work last year, and it compares well to my own cordless Dremel. We were using the Lidl one every day, and provided you remembered to put it on charge at lunchtime and before you went home, it held up admirably. We even used a 50mm diamond cutting disc on ours.

Red Letter Days probably just put a premium on what you would pay by going directly to a club. Some clubs such as Lasham operate every flyable day. Other smaller volunteer-run clubs may operate weekends only. Hill sites such as The Midland Gliding Club at the Long Mynd, Yorkshire Club at Sutton Bank, London Gliding Club at Dunstable and the Bristol & Gloucestershire Club at Nympsfield, near Stroud, give the advantage of ridge soaring on a non-thermic day. It is usual for trial lessons to be aerotows, although if the club has a winch as well, it is often possible to have some winch launches as well if the first flight was enjoyable. A word of warning, doing aerobatics on the first flight can often leave the passenger feeling queasy. It is better to have a more sedate flight and actually control the glider (most instructors will allow this after the launch phase is over and before the landing circuit is started). Typically a 2000ft aerotow in still air will give about a 15 to 20 minute flight (including the tow). A flight by winch launch to 1000ft will only last about five minutes as the launch is quicker, and in both cases the landing circuit starts at about 750ft.

If you're looking for a Super Frontier, this one on Facebook Marketplace appears to be a bargain. I tried to persuade our club to get it as a trainer that our older pupils might actually be able to see, but got told we're not buying a club trainer. Super Frontier Trainer

A cardboard model building event would make a fun club competition, using a specified motor/esc/battery drivetrain, and the bare minimum of off the shelf parts. Several designs in Cardboard are available: Cardsharp Cardboard Stick Pappendeckel:

Jim, the supplement maybe due to a fatal accident which involved an AcroWot. The tail surfaces came adrift and the model crashed killing a thirteen year old girl, Tara Lipscombe. The model was found to have had the failed tail surface joint onto film-covered components. Although the model concerned was an AcroWot, the failure could just as easily have happened to any model in which the same error had been made. AcroWot fatal accident - April 2003

It sounds a bit like our gliding club's winch; if the cable was wound on under too much tension, a turn of cable could get pulled under two adjacent turns that had a small gap between them. The cable was then trapped which would then cause the weak link to break when towing the cable back to the launch point. Synthetic cables also had an issue if wound on under tension, then left until the following week. It wasn't unknown for steel cable drums to be crushed by the cumulative effect of all the turns shrinking a little bit each. The winch manufacturers advised always having the last 'wind in' of the day just towing a tyre across the airfield, to ensure the cable was relaxed. In terms of the printer filament, if it was wound on when warm or under a lot of tension, and allowed to get very cold, the tension could similarly have dragged strands to where they are trapped by others.

Perhaps the solution to the scale finishing issue lies in getting something like a car wrap pre-printed. It might seem expensive for a one off, but once the hours of labour and cost of materials for conventional methods are considered, it might work. In theory, if the files are kept, repair panels could be printed too.

The Air Transport Auxiliary and the American Women's Air Service Pilots must have had a few Barbaras, Lucindas and Cynthias, so not totally unscale. 😄

I bought an EZ Sportsman 25H with an Eny SS30 on the front at a bring & buy (I think), just because I wanted a trainer type model for giving lessons at the time. It turned out to be a really nice model as, with a near symmetrical wing section it was very aerobatic. I think a battery failure caused its demise, going straight in from a good height. I subsequently found an unbuilt kit on Ebay 'collection only' and persuaded the seller to post it. I don't have a picture of mine, but this is one off the net:

Leccyflyer, there's a Flair Attila wiht an SC30 four stroke for sale here: https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/179191618508882?ref=marketplace_profile&referral_code=undefined

Rich, there's a Mk1 Hiboy in this collection. There's also a Falcon Kits Sunbeam which is a very nice model for a .25 or 30. Mk1 HiBoy, Falcon Kits Sunbeam & Extra 300S in Wells

There are only two sorts of weather; building weather and flying weather.

Having acquired a number of ARTF 40-powered trainers to assist with training at our club, I'm now faced with patching holes in each of them. Whilst some will need covering cut out and replaced with Solarfilm or similar, I would like to preserve the existing printed colour schemes as much as possible. To that end I'm looking for methods that allow as much of the existing covering to be reused. I'm sure I saw an article about this years ago that had some very clever methods, but can't remember what they were. I have some clear laminating film and a Prolux digital covering iron and I have found the latter on low settings will help re-tack and shrink the original printed covering. Any methods and suggestions greatly appreciated!

It appears tha part of the problem is a torque rod undercarriage which is designed to move through an arc when under load and a rigid spat that prevents this, except by damaging the wing, as happened. Cutting back the top of the spat, fore and aft of the leg, then replacing it with a flexible material would help prevent this damage reoccurring. As for the repair, I would use the densest foam I could find there. A piece of expanded polystyrene packaging from a TV for example. If you cut it into a double ended wedge, and a matching hole for it where the damage is, there would be the minimum of a stress point as the strong, dense foam blends into the weaker less dense foam.

It was probably something like a chip detector light that came on. That would indicate metal particles detected in one of the gearboxes. Getting down on the ground ASAP is the safest course of action. This is one from 2021: RAF Benson Chinook made precautionary landing, January 2021

Kevin b, that is very kind of you to make your drawing available. I'm sure that represents a good few hours work to produce the original. Gary, I've found this picture of the Ripmax Trainer 30 here: Ripmax Trainer 30 . Do you happen to know if all the models with a predominantly white colour scheme are the 30 size version, and if not, what other colours was the Ripmax Trainer 30 produced in? Yet another Trainer 40 in this ad here, cheap,albeit quite dilapidated! Ripmax Trainer 40 & others in Bridport, £15

Gary, It looks very similar to the much more common Ripmax Trainer 40, so if you can get one of those from Ebay, Facebook Marketplace or wherever, and scale from it, you wouldn't be far off. Its very similar to a whole host of trainers available 20 years ago, so any of them would give the right proportions, if you just scale to suit the wing you have. Here is the instruction manoual which covers the 30 and 40 size variants: Ripmax 30 & 40 Instruction Manual This advert includes a picture of a Ripmax Trainer Fuselage, which you could scale from: Ripmax Trainer Fuselage (second picture). I rather fancy that Cierva Autogyro kit he's selling! Another one (probably a 40) here: Ripmax Trainer in Yeovil

Browsing through Ebay, I came across this oddity. 'Rave Trainer' on Ebay Its almost as though someone designed a model without much reference to what anyone else had done before, then kitted it, or at least did a plan for it. Maybe it was a design and technology project, as that sharp leading edge (nasty stall) and wire cross axle (grasscatcher) and weak tail (large lightening holes) would not make it easy to operate and learn on. Has anyone ever heard of it?

There are some closeups of a 100" Miri in this completed Ebay listing: Cambria Miri 100 and another one here, complete with a six channel Futaba M series: Miri 100 + Futaba M series

To remain profitable in an ever changing world and an ever changing hobby, we should take a look at the companies that do appear to be succeeding. Flite Test is one that springs to mind, as their Youtube presence and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) educational focus ensures that there is a new audience being exposed to their products. To say that model flying is a dying hobby isn't necessarily true, its just that the newcomers can now fly in places other than an established club environment. Autostabilisation, quiet electric models and R/C flight simulators mean that youngsters have a chance of success even if they do teach themselves. For a company such as Ripmax to survive, they need to work out what they add to the value of their products as far as the retailer and customer are concerned. If they aren't keeping stock in a UK warehouse that a local shop (if you can find one) can get in in days, then a customer may well find it easier and quicker to order online from whoever has the item in, or directly from abroad.

Paul, I suspect it would be like the arrival of the alien spacecraft in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There is so much technology that would need to be developed before the parts could be produced (Extruded high tensile aluminium alloy, strong synthetic fabrics, a small and light high revving two stroke engine with a lightweight gearbox that can take the loads). A lot of these materials came about because a need was seen, but the processes to produce them took years of development. You need to look at what else was around at the time of the Wright Brothers to see the technology they had available to them. Aviation and the wars that used aeroplanes, had a massive effect on technology, but even the Avro 504 was still ten years after the Wright Flyer. The Junkers J1 Blechesel ("Tin Donkey") of 1915 was a truly groundbreaking aircraft with its all metal construction and cantilever wing. Only 12 years after the Wright Brothers, this aeroplane showed the way ahead, although it was not in itself a great success on account of it being heavier than the biplanes of the time. These externally braced biplanes remained dominant for the next twenty years, as manufacturing technology caught up enough to produce the lightweight metal structures the streamlined monoplanes required.

You're right Simon. The Wright 1903 Flyer was the correct design for the technology that Orville and Wilbur had available to them. A 12hp engine flying a 745lb (all up weight) aeroplane is pretty incredible. The canard layout allowed the Flyer to rotate up off the launch rail and climb in the wind gradient (sort of dynamic soaring), then do a powered descent. Really their fourth, 59 second, flight was the first true, sustained, powered flight. The others were just extended glides. Only when they had more power available to them did the brothers extend the fuselage fore and aft on the rebuilt Wright 1905 Flyer 3, giving it longitudunal stability. This allowed flight times to increase from five minutes to twenty minutes, as the pilot workload was significantly reduced. Ailerons require a stiff wing structure if servo tab effect is to be avoided. The first Antoinette monoplanes had ailerons, however they soon reverted to wing warping as the ailerons simply distorted the wing.