F/FSport
“Nothing is as simple as we all hope it will be.”—JIM HORNING
I
always like to think that two goals of this column are to encourage modelers to try freeflight if they’ve not done so, or to return to freeflight if they’ve been
away for a while. Recently, I received an e- mail and two of the photos included this month from reader Tom Binkley. Sometime prior to the current e-mail, Tom had ex- pressed a desire to “build and fly something freeflight one day soon.” Here’s the result of Tom’s experience: “...F/F’ers get a healthy amount of exer-
cise chasing their planes. I needed that, so I bought a reVerb from Bill Stevens last week at the Arizona Electric Fest in Mesa. It’s an entry level chuck glider with a catapult to save your arm. Like all of his kits, it is very quick and fun to build—so quick in fact that I forgot to take construction photos. It flies well and requires plenty of chasing, so I am officially back in F/F.” Flushed with his initial success and con- tinuing his awakened enthusiasm, Tom scratchbuilt his own HLG based on the Stevens kit. He launched it on its first flight and “watched it glide beautifully across the park and land...” At this point the narrative takes a small
detour. “Before I could walk over to retrieve it,” he relays, “the Parks and Recreation worker drove his truck across the grass to the other side of the park. My glider must have blended into the dead grass. I doubt he saw it. It makes a great picture, doesn’t it?” Welcome back to freeflight, Tom!
In the same vein Texas modeler, Grant Carson, is not new
to freeflight by any stretch of the imagina- tion, and in fact has gained the reputation of winning contests with models not partic-
by larry kruse You can reach Larry Kruseat 18 NW Heatherstone Drive, Lawton, Oklahoma 73505, or via e-mail at
aircats@att.net
PHOTO: GRANT CARSON
This Easy Built kit of the 1940 design, the Scatterbrain, provided some surprises for builder Grant Carson as he began test flights. The model bears a resemblance to the Scientific Miss Worlds Fair with its swept wings, dual rudders and long nose, although the fuselage is bulkier.
ularly well-known as top-flight contest mod- els. In a fit of building economy, Grant re- cently built a Scatterbrain, a 1940 Easy Built Models design with a 30-inch wingspan, because it is eligible for SAM (So- ciety of Antique Modelers) Small Rubber Fuselage, SAM Commercial Rubber, and FAC (Flying Aces Club) Old Time Rubber Cabin. Grant figured that he could pack three events into one building project. Because of its long nose moment and swept-back wing as shown in the accompa- nying photo, Grant reasoned that the model would come out nose heavy, so he carved a 10-inch prop out of light balsa, used light
balsa for the wheels, and hollowed out the nose block. Even with those efforts to “add lightness” to the model, he had to add weight to the tail to get it to balance. With the addition of the weight, the mod-
el came in at disappointing 43 grams with- out rubber. While that’s not a catastrophi- cally heavy airframe, Grant didn’t think it would be a contest caliber model. As a con- sequence of that disappointment, he didn’t bother to fit it with a dethermalizer and rel- egated it in his mind to a “sport flyer” status. Test flying the model began to show some-
thing different, however. Grant says that af- ter a few test flight with hand winds, he
PHOTOS: TOM BINKLEY
Tom Binkley had great success in building a freeflight plane with his Stevens Aero reVerbcatapult glider (above left). The kit went together quickly and easily and flew very well. Tom’s subsequent freeflight model, scratchbuilt and based
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on the Stevens Aero reVerb (above right), met an untimely end under the wheels of a park maintenance truck. Not all mishaps are from crashes! More of the adventure in the text.
MAY 2012
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