OldtimerTopics P
ublishing deadlines are such that I sent in the copy for my November column the day before I drove up to Las Vegas for the 2013 SAM Champs. Attendance was down this year, but we had several overseas contestants and visitors. Gabriele Montebelli, Luigi Sola, Tizano Bortolai and Walther Gianati were active competitors from Italy. John Selby came up from New Zealand and gave a good account of himself in several R/C events. I didn’t catch the full name of the accom- plished old time rubber flyer from Denmark who had been to several previous SAM Champs.
Tom Boice led a group of fliers out of Ohio
who came loaded for bear in the R/C dura- tion events. Boice obviously spent a lot of time and engineering thought on how to get engines to run a long time. His Cox .049s ran a very long time in both 1⁄2A R/C Texaco and in the 1⁄2A Scale duration events. His Avro (shown in one of the pictures) took first place. His full size Bomber was powered by a Forster .99 for Classic Texaco. He used a remote carburetor from a small OS engine, and had a clear plastic syringe tank with a float device in it.
It was interesting to talk with Tom about his ideas. A lot of his effort is devoted to keeping air leaks out of fuel lines and sys- tems. He’s still looking for an adhesive (to seal joints on fuel lines) that’s impervious to alcohol, gasoline and nitromethane. He’s not found one yet that resists all three. If some- one who reads this column knows of such an adhesive, let me know!
Boice was the Ignition R/C Grand Cham- pion, and also the Special Events Grand Champion. His flying partner, Andy La- towski (who’s also the SAM Midwest VP), was the R/C Glow Grand Champion. It looks
George Walter, of Southern California, shows good form on release of his Korda large rubber model. PHOTOGRAPHY: MIKE MYERS
like the upper Midwest cleaned up fairly well in the hardware department! The Italian group also focuses on duration
events, and they were generous in showing the modifications they’d made to their en- gines. They told me that it’s very expensive to use glow fuel in Europe (with some coun- tries having issued outright bans on nitro - methane). As a result, flyers have gone to diesel engines.
One of the prominent diesel engine manu- facturers in Europe has stopped producing the engines, so some of the Italians have taken to producing their own diesel conver- sion heads for glow engines. All in all, I saw a lot of fascinating engineering stuff at this year’s Champs.
The weather was very good for the first day and a half, but Tuesday afternoon and all of Wednesday was pretty much a blowout, accompanied by some light rain.
The weather was flyable on Thursday and fantastic on Friday.
There were some interesting things to see or compete with in the various “special” events. There were a dozen or more Tomboys flown. The Tomboy class is won by the longest single flight time of the week, and one fellow put up a 16-minute plus flight on Monday. That meant that all the other Tomboy flyers chased that time all week—and didn’t catch it.
Brad Levine was up from Los Angeles with his Taylor Young gas scale job, pow- ered by a .10 or .15 sized diesel. The Taylor Young is a veteran of many flights and had more than a bit of that “diesel soaked” look well-used planes get. Once Brad got the trim sorted to his liking, he put up several fantas- tic flights.
Ron Boots’ Compressed Air Mass Launch event had half a dozen flyers. All of them got
by mike myers You can reach Mike Myersat 911 Kilmary Lane, Glendale, CA 91207, or via e-mail at
mikemyersgln@charter.net
Andy Latowski, holding Tom Boice’s contest winning scale duration model (above left), gets a lot of advice from Bob Angel on the left and Ed Hamler on the right. How much advice does one man need? Jack Hiner (above right)
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prepares to launch his 1600-square inch electric Airborn powered by a Neu motor in the Electric LMR event. Jack won the Electric Grand Champion award, placing well in all of the electric events.
JANUARY 2014
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