CrossFiles I
just received my Hiller Commuter kit from Copter Concepts. It looks really nice with laser-cut parts and preformed rotor blades. These blades will save a lot
of work and will improve flight over hand cut blades since they will balance aerodynami- cally better. Ray will create more interesting copter and maybe autogyro kits as time goes by. Contact Ray Kierna at Copter Concepts, 21 West 205 Tee Lane, Apt C, Itasca, IL 60143 or
flyguyandgal.1@netzero.com. Mike Moskow is no stranger to these
pages. Mike likes to build big models and has proven to be a fierce competitor in al- most any F/F category. His New Bird was designed by Ted Just in 1941 and appeared in the 1942 Model Airplane News and also in a 1993 SAM magazine. It spans 58 inch- es with a 286-square inch area and weighs about 350 grams including a 100-gram mo- tor. I’m sure Mike will be able to get his usu- al great times and I await flight results in a future column. I’m sure all of you remember the “Han-
nan’s Hangar” columns in Model Builder magazine. Bill had a great group of contrib- utors and always had some interesting sto- ries to tell. When I asked for pictures to help fill this column, Bill generously got busy and picked out some good ones. Here’s one he sent of the late Nate Sturman, who lived in Japan and flew rubber F/F designs. This is his Jill from 1995. It was Nate’s own design and spans 29 inches, weighs 115 grams with eight strands of 1
⁄16 brown rubber and has a
hand carved, 4-blade prop formed from Earl Stahl’s P-51 blanks. Bill sent some B&W fly- ing pics that won’t print well but they show the model pulling out with authority and climbing nicely. My next entry is almost an article by it-
self. It shows John Krouse’s kit-bashed ParkZone Ember with John’s own mods that PHOTO: BILL HANAN
by don ross You can reach Don Rossat 817 Ames Hill Drive, Tewksbury, MA 01876, or via e-mail at
flywords@comcast.net
PHOTO: MIKE MOSKOW
Mike Moskow is back with a new big rubber job that will surely be very competitive in this summer’s contests. It’s from all the way back in 1941. It spans 58 inches and carries 100 grams of rubber.
change the flight characteristics. John cred- its Stew Myers in this magazine with the in- spiration. He removed the 4-inch diameter, 2-bladed, nose mounted prop and substitut- ed a smaller 2.5-inch, 4-bladed thruster at- tached to the front wing mount. The stock 6mm brushed motor was replaced by an 8.5mm unit along with a 130 mAh Li-Po bat- tery instead of the 70 mAh cell. A flexible motor mount was made from squeezed flat
5⁄32
-inch aluminum tubing that can be bent side-to-side for left/right thrust adjustment. John says the increased weight and thrust make the model easier to fly outdoors in a mild breeze. Got an interesting comment from Lou Buffardi about a great kit he found on e-Bay. It’s an Arado on floats at 17.58-inch span and is packed with goodies like 17 sheets of balsa, 11 rolled sheets of drawings, formed
PHOTO: JOHN KROUSE
Bill Hannan has been kind enough to search his archives for pictures to add to this column. Here’s the late Nate Sturman (at left) in Japan with his Japanese Jill of WWII. John Krouse has done an interesting job bashing a standard Ember R/C (above) to raise the motor to the wing mount, change the battery and motor and create a new motor mount to make the airplane a better light wind flyer.
28 MARCH 2012
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