Volume 7 Issue 7 Pages 4 AMA #530 District 11 www.eugenerc.com July 2011 Club Mailing Address: Eugene R/C Aeronauts, PO Box 26344, Eugene, OR. 97402 ERCA News and Information Next CLUB Meeting - July 26, 2011, 7:00 pm at the field. If you have a building project, bring it with you for "Show and Tell". At the June Meeting - Great turn out for June's meeting 28 attendees. Proposed By-Law Changes were amended and passed. Solar Power at the field was discussed again. Nothing at this point has been decided. August 6th Benton County Club will be visiting Our Club. Trump's Raffle for the Gift certificate was a success. We sold 101 tickets @ $5 each. Gift Cert cost club $350 so club made $155. CONGRATULATIONS to Mel Graham!! He was the lucky winner of the Gift Cert. Discussion was brought up and approved to Charge a $10 Landing Fee @ the Big Bird Fly July 16th, Fun Fly August 13th and the Labor Day Fun Fly. Included in the $10 Landing Fee is a raffle ticket for the Trump Gift Cert. Big Bird was a success. Mike & Brad were Contest Directors. We had 10 registered Pilots. Each Pilot was given a raffle ticket each time they landed a plane. There were 4 raffle prizes. The prizes were $25 gift certificate to Eugene Toy & Hobby. The winners were: Al Barrington was the lucky winner winning 2 gift certificates; Mark Winz won 1 and Donny Krenz also won 1. Discussion was brought up about visiting other Clubs. Pylon Racing - July 9 - We did not have enough racers or volunteers show up to have a race. The weather was iffy but ok for racing. Hopefully more will show for the next race. Meeting minutes are ONLINE at: http://eugenerc.com/meetings.html 2011 Meeting Dates Meeting dates EWEB came up with that were available and closest to our requested dates: TUES, JUL 26 - Field - 4th Tues TUES, AUG 23 - Field - 4th Tues WED, SEP 21 - EWEB TUES, OCT 25 - Pizza WED, NOV 23 - EWEB DEC - No meeting WITH THE WEEKDAY WARRIORS Summer is here! You wouldn't believe it on the evidence of the last week or so, but it is here and we've had some more-than-decent flying weather. July usually sees less than 3/4" of rain and we've already had 1.13" as of today (7/18), but we have still had some good flying days out at Alvadore Rd. That's when it hasn't been blowing too hard, of course, and there have been more such days than we'd have liked. Nevertheless - as I keep telling you - we did have flyable days. The Grahams, p‚re et fils, got a lot of practice in for a possible return to the Pattern Wars. Old Mel is flying something Chinese, called a Spot-On, with an O.S. 1.20 2-stroke and has it flying just the way he wants it to. Or the Spot-On has trained Mel to fly it in the way it wishes to be flown. That, too, is a possibility. A problem has reared its ugly head: Bits of covering have begun to work loose. Some of it is just trim, but there are also some seams in the base covering which are starting to open and -worse - right in line with the exhaust efflux. Mel's dilemma is this: Play Fire Brigade and go around sealing up the holes until the season is over or just srip the darn thing now and recover it? JR, the other Graham, has taken to (his father's) Reactor Biplane. He loves the way it flies and he flies it with abandon. This ship, however, is powered by the problematic YS 110 which has a long-standing rep for giving you three sensational performances and then blowing a valve-cover gasket. This happened with depressing regularity until Papa Graham was set to toss the YS as far as he could or at least as far as the trash can. JR intercepted the pass before it was halfway to the garbage dump. He took of f the valve cover and had a hard look at its seat. The seat was very narrow, so JR widened it with a collar of JB Weld, smoothed it all down and ground it flat. It took a couple of tries, but the valve-cover leak seems to have been beaten. Understand, will you, that the YSs are all pumped and everything has to be sealed so as to contain the pressure. That valve cover seam is now as tight as can be - and there's another leak somewhere, only revealing itself now that the valve cover is sealed. JR says he can hear it back in the system and, the last time I looked, he had the whole fuselage emptied in an attempt to find it. I hope he does, because that Reactor Bipe flies so beautifully when the engine is singing. Wayne Wahrmund is now wearing a second hat. While wearing his old one - Wayne Wahrmund, Everyday Flier - he was tooling about the sky with his Funtana, the ex- Doug Deveraux model with the mods and the oversize engine, when he casually flipped the Dual-Rates switch on the transmitter. Alas, it turned out the he the Kill switch for the engine and the ensuing deadstick was not a thing of beauty. The fuselage was cracked right around the wing highpoint. CyA to the rescue and the Funtana flew again the same day. May I here offer the possibility that today's transmitters might just have too many switches on them? You may say, "We're not Wayne. We'd never do a thing like that." Uh, huh. By the way, Wayne was going to try to keep that story from me, lest it end up in this column, but he confessed. They always confess. Like Roskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, they just blurt it out. At least one of the new guys is getting some airtime. Doyle Cook has a Sig LT-40 and his mentor is none other than our Mr. Wahrmund wearing his second hat - Wayne Wahrmund, Instructor. When last I saw them, Doyle and Wayne were both able to stand without assistance and the plane was in as good a shape as it was when it started the day. There was some discussion about the merits of doing a hit of fettling on the landing gear. The three or four of you who read this column will remember that I was taking off for a couple of weeks in Mid-June. I got to WITH THE WEEKDAY WARRIORS continued see a nice, though not sensational, airshow in France. No, not the Paris Air Show; that's all jets and noise. The theme of this one was The Temps des H‚lices" - "The Time of the Props". This year marks the 100th anniversary of the day L‚on Morane and Raymond Saul- nier started the company that bore their names, so we had a lot of M-S types flying before us. This included seven of the famous "Parasols" from the 20s and 30s. There was also an M-S 406, a fighter type from the Battle of France. The poor 406, it handled well, was quite maneuverable, had a 20mm cannon firing through the propeller huh - but only 850 hp when the rest of the World had at least 1000. And, of all things to find in a French airshow, an N3N-3! Built at the Naval Aircraft Factory in the Philadelphia Navy Yard (817 of them), they were just a hair larger, heavier, and more powerful than the N25/PT-13/PT-17 series. They could operate off either wheels or floats and the last biplanes flown by the U.S. Forces were three N3Ns on floats, flying from the Severn River at Annapolis to give the midshipmen at the Academy air experience in 1961. Saw some terrific cars and trains as well. How about a Bugatti pickup truck and a Bugatti railcar? Thought: What is your Editor's Optical Reader going to do to those accents aigu, like the one in L‚on? That he will make a dog's breakfast of them is a foregone conclusion, but how? With luck, he will just ignore them. C. O'D. July Meeting - Good turnout, food and flying! Raffle drawing held Congratulations to the lucky winner Mel Graham! $500 Gift certificate for Trumps Hobbies And a big thanks to the members that sold the tickets: Brad Werneth, Doug McWha, Jayne Krenz. GOOD JOB! --- That's All Folks - Eugene R/C Aeronauts Newsletter Editor 1618 Gilham Rd. Eugene, OR. 97401 July 2011 ®FirstLast¯ ®Street¯ ®CityStZip¯ ERCA CLUB CONTACTS President: Brad Werneth - 541-285-5935 - brad@werneth.com Vice President: Mike Farr - 541-689-4564 - far-owt@comcast.net Sec/Treasurer: Al Barrington - 541-935-4960 - albarrington@msn.com Safety coordinator: Marry Wittman - 541-968-2094 - wittmanm@yahoo.com Groundskeeper: Doug McWha - 541-741-3326 - flyduke@comcast.net Newsletter Editor: Jim Corbett - 541-344-5022 - james.corbett@comcast.net Next CLUB Meeting - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 - 7:00 pm at the Field December 2009 2 July 2011 3