This evening I spent a glorious evening over the local racecourse,the grass was just ideal for some test trimming of an handful of small rubber driven scale models,these were the toils of last winters hard work breathing in balsa dust ! the conditions were just perfect with a very light cool breeze blowing,the skylarks dived all over the place as if to say 'this is our airspace,go away !' I wound up my Curtiss Seagull ready for its maiden flight,carefully holding the noseblock I started with 150 turns and held her at shoulder height slightly nose down,then launched her and away she went,with a wafting slight turn to the left she was away and climbed to about 100 feet,carefully levelled out and landed in the long grass that was to protect her should things go bottoms up ! after retrieving the model and un-wrapping numerous strands of grass that had entwined itself in the propeller bearing I wound her up again,this time I piled on some 350 turns of well lubricated rubber,held her aloft again and tried for a second flight,she climbed like an homesick angel this time to about 200 feet and headed off downwind at a fast rate of knots with me in hot pursuit ! what fun,it brought back memories of youth chasing free flight models over farmers fields and across countryside.
A broken rubber motor put paid to any further flying with her, so I did some flying with my electric powered glider,this time climbing to a heady several hundred feet on a hot and humid evening,those little rubber models were all about my roots,that is exactly how I got started many years ago,in those days it was usually a badly warped wing due to excess of clear dope on the structure,nobody told me that you had to add thinners to weaken it ! but that was all a learning curve for me,we learn from our mistakes in this way.
So you see you do not always need all singing high tech gear to enjoy yourself,here was a simple case of low tech fun at its best,its just the way we all see things to get our kicks,cannot wait to get some fresh rubber and re-enact those schoolboy days when it was off to the flying field when the homework was all done Happy modelling days to you all whether it be sailing or flying or whatever,it is all the same.
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