FREE FLIGHT SPORT and SCALE
Bill Warner, 1370 Monache Avenue, Porterville CA 93257
Stop In The Name Of Reduced Drag!
In the December San Diego Scale Staffel newsletter, Tom Arnold wrote of his shock in learning that Red Boyles' Tony, which won many mass-launch events (including one at the FAC Nationals), had a non-freewheeling propeller.
Tom quoted Red as saying, "Freewheelers never seemed to help. This stays up just as long with a stopped prop, so why bother?"
What to make of this world-shaking statement? Whenever the prop stops on my rubber model, the relative wind wants to spin the aircraft on its longitudinal axis, inducing a dropped right-hand wingtip with the subsequent loss of lift and a spiral down to earth!
My first thought was that Red might be putting us on, slipping on a non-freewheeler at the scale judging as a practical joke. It would have been fun to see fliers come out to the field, try to emulate Red's success by using his trick method, and wind up in the ditch! It was worth a telephone call to Arizona to find out.
It soon became clear from talking with Red that this stopped-prop idea did not come from being too lazy to build a freewheeling device. He researched a number of aeronautical texts and was intrigued by one stating that on a full-scale aircraft, a feathered prop gave a .01 drag coefficient, a stopped prop gave .10, and a windmilling one gave .40. Even considering that the blade area and diameter on a rubber-model propeller are much greater, there might still be a significant difference. It was testing time.
Red set up his model in a glide mode with a fairly tightly braided motor and a few winds in it to keep the center of gravity where it belonged. He taped the prop to the cowl in a horizontal attitude to keep it from turning. Over grass in the park, he glided it about 20 times until he was getting the maximum distance possible. He removed the tape and allowed the prop to freewheel, and the distance he could reach dropped by one-third. There was something to this!
Red modified his nose block with a stop, similar to what folding-prop flyers use. The stop consists of a stub of music wire protruding from the back of the block. The rest of the arrangement is roughly as follows:
- An extra bit of "tang" is bent onto the "S" hook on the rear of the prop shaft so that it just misses the stop under the tension of the fully wound braided motor, but will make contact with the stop when the turns run out.
- A little spring washer, made from a bit of folded-over plastic vellum (an oval hole in the center with the ends folded over), goes between the Peck thrust washer and the prop. It expands just enough at the end of the motor run to move the prop shaft forward into "contact-and-stop" mode (prop in a horizontal position).
The model is set to fly a R.H. pattern with a little positive wash-in in the right wing. As a prop stopped in this position wants to rotate the airplane to the right, the wash-in counteracts that tendency. Rudder is used to make final adjustments. Red says that the model flies with one wing down under power, but then glides left. He builds very light models, which means that they fly at slower speeds than normal, and that tends to make little warps and twists less effective than they might be on the kind of stuff that most of us build.
I believe that models with larger-than-usual props might be more difficult to handle, and models prone to go into spiral dives when upset because of large fin areas might also pose problems. Still, Red has made his Tony into a winner, and you cannot argue away success! Let me know if the "stopped prop" method works for you.
Cottage Wings Resource Guide
The coverage that Free Flight (FF) Scale gets in most magazines might lead you to believe that not very much is available in the way of plans, kits, supplies, clubs, etc. — but the opposite is true. There is a ton of good stuff out there from small outfits and dedicated modelers all across the world.
To get a copy of the latest Cottage Wings — the nonprofit annotated list of hundreds of useful sources — send two dollar bills and a legal-size (large) self-addressed stamped envelope with two first-class stamps to Carlo Godel, 5726 Case Ave., North Hollywood CA 91601. By the time this is printed, Carlo should be retired and will be moving to Grand Junction, Colorado, so don't wait too long!
Free Flight On The Internet
The world is rapidly coming to the point where being computer literate is a necessity. A quick check of the weather this morning for the city where I was going to attend a contest saved me a 400-mile round trip; that more than paid for this month's $20 server fee for being hooked up to the Net.
You can shop for model supplies, see photos of other guys' models, download documentation, send mail to or chat with other modelers, get information on clubs, etc. There are many possibilities. How much time and energy does it cost your club to put your monthly newsletter out to a few dozen people? Imagine reaching hundreds or thousands of people for less!
Joe Joseph, editor of the Windy Sock of the FAC (Flying Aces Club) — Alamo Escadrille, suggests that the percentage of FF coverage in the model press today is inadequate, and I agree. If the number of modelers is all that is considered, we are getting about all that we are going to get as long as advertising revenue comes mainly from the big spenders in the Radio Control majority. Free flighters buy a pound of rubber for fifteen bucks and it lasts five years. A dedicated quarter-scale flier probably uses that much worth of fuel in a morning's flying! So rather than spending all of our time bemoaning the "facts of life," why don't we get hip and make the Internet work for us?
Joe suggests that most clubs have someone who's "online," and that he can scan the many existing sites and print stuff of interest from them to bring to club meetings (for a small fee to cover his costs of, say, five cents a page). If your club has someone who is computer literate, such as the Alamo Escadrille's George Bredehoff or the D.C. Maxecutters' Don Stull, consider a club Web page that can be visited by anyone, anytime — and in color with pictures!
The Alamo site can be reached at http://www.battlecreek.net/volare/alamo. It gets about 500 visits a month, and if there were more than 1,000 (easy to envision), the club can get advertising to help defray the monthly cost of the site.
After the site is "constructed," it requires a monthly service charge to keep it going on a computer bank owned by a "server." Considering what it costs to get out a black-and-white newsletter, a Web site could be a real bargain and could boost your club's membership.
Sites usually contain "links" — quick routes to other sites of interest. With a click of a button, you can read about a guy who flew before the Wrights, or maybe get electronic mail from model friends, or order Bill Hannan's latest model book without leaving your chair. I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the computer age, but once I was in the Magic Kingdom of Cyberspace, there was no going back. If you don't believe me, arrange for a tour with someone who is already set up. Check out Joe Joseph's site and try the Maxecutters pages at http://www.his.com/~tschmitt/.
FF Scale In The Movies
Alan and Naomi is a film about a young Jewish boy in New York during WWII. He tries to help a Parisian refugee girl, who moves in across the street, recover from the horror of seeing her father murdered by the Gestapo. The boy shows her toy airplanes, gains her friendship, and later enters his prototypes in a model aircraft contest. There are several free flight scenes, and the film gives a good feeling for our sport. It's a warm, human movie and well worth seeing.
Seamless Paper Background For Cheap Photo Backgrounds
Bill Hannan writes that he has been using a roll of developed blueprint paper (blue on one side, white on the other) he purchased for three or four bucks. If kept in a closet to prevent fading, it will last for years. Check out your local blueprint place in the phone book to see what they have.
Reproducing And Selling Old Plans
I have received quite a pile of mail on the subject of plans piracy. Most of it differentiates between people selling plans that are still available from original sources and/or copyright protected, and plans that have been "abandoned." Tom Dixon (Marietta, GA) sums it up by referring to those who find and make plans available that might otherwise be lost to the bulk of modelers as "treasure hunters" rather than "pirates." "Rescuing lost stuff," Tom says, is an honorable endeavor and the hobby as a whole benefits from it.
The Flying Aces Nats
The biennial FAC Nats is coming to Geneseo, NY! Scale judging will be July 16, with flying on the 17–19, and the final day will be capped off by the banquet. Mark your calendar; if you are planning to attend, don't wait another minute to make arrangements! Contact FAC GHQ, 3301 Cindy Lane, Erie PA 16506 for details.
It's time for you to build that last model to take to Geneseo. How about that one that you've always wanted to build but never got to? You have three months, and you're not getting any younger! See ya there!
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
