It has finally happened. Your columnist has been up to the field on only one weekday (since the last column) when there was anybody flying there. If we didn’t have fog down around our ears all day, we had rain. There was that stretch of a few days which saw the high temperatures not getting out of the low 30s and I doubted that even the usually intrepid Weekday Warriors would be daring those frosty morns.

     On the one day mentioned above, I found only Wayne Wahrmund and Dwayne Graville flying from a quite soggy runway. Wayne had his U-Can-Do, now powered by a new Saito .82 4-stroke. He’s been breaking in the engine and has it so far along that he has confidently shrouded it in a cowl. The Saito .82 is worming its way into Wayne’s heart; he says it’s a first-class engine. We do have to convince our Wayne that holes in cowls for exhaust stacks, needle-valve exten-sions, air intakes, and the like should have rounded cor-ners. This is an aesthetic consideration, of course, but it is also true that square corners in plastic tend to develop cracks.

     Dwayne was flying his faithful LT-40, the one with the distinctly elderly Enya .46 up front. He tells me that he got a handful of wrecked models from Chuck Jenkins, among which was one slightly smaller than the LT. (Seniorita?) He intends to repair that one and put it on floats. He has a set of floats which are just a bit small for the larger ship and should be just right for the smaller.

     Dwayne gave me a list of R/C frequencies he got off the computer. It gives all the ham frequencies, the 72 meg frequencies for airplanes, the 75 meg frequencies for cars and boats, and even those in use in the UK, though not the ones for Canada. This list also has the still-legal 27 meg spots the toy manufacturers are using on things you see in department stores. Down at the bottom of this list is 27.255 mc. Ah, doesn’t that bring hack memories! When I started flying P/C in 1958, I was on 27.255. So was every-body else. Well, there were quite a few people on the Ham bands, but those of us without Amateur Radio licenses were on 27.255. You took turns - one guy in the air at a time. You had to have a Citizens’ Band Radio License to use the gear, but there was no exam required as there was for the Ham band. All you had to do was send in the application and the fee to the FCC and back came the license. I remember that fee as $8.00, but Editor Corbett says that $12.00 comes to mind. He confesses that, as a lad, he flew illegally, sans license. (N.B. If the next issue of this newsletter bears a Leavenworth, Kansas, postmark, you’ll know that the Statute of Limitations has not run out.) The fee was annual, by the way. Fairly early in the game, they dropped first the fee and then the license, but I cannot remember the years of their demises.

     There was another exam-free frequency available, 465mc, but I never saw a 465 rig in use on any of the fields we flew on. It had a reputation - deserved or not, I don’t know - as being short on range. It also had an antenna with two elements, one of which had to he oriented vertically and the other horizontally. The antenna had to be installed in the wing, away from batteries, receiver, and assorted wires. When you put on the wing, you plugged in your antenna as you now do your aileron servo. That may have contributed to the marginal popularity of 465 mc..

     There was no fuss about plugging in the aileron servo, because there was no aileron servo. These models were single-channel, rudder-only. There was a variety of actua-tors for that rudder, some of them a bit, let’s say, bizarre, but the most common were the escapement operated by a wound-up loop of ¼” rubber and the pulse actuator. I used the former which gave you right rudder on one push of the button and left with two pushes. That’s full right or left, none of this effete proportional stuff. Turns were made in a series of steps, because holding down the button dropped the nose into a spiral dive. Loops, rolls, and Immelmanns were possible, but that’s a story for another time.

     Pulse-proportional actuators kept the rudder in constant motion from left to right. The pulse was fast enough that the plane, which was quite slow, simply did not notice the rudder motion and flew straight ahead. When you moved the stick to one side, the rudder pulsed more to that side than the other and, voila, a turn, either open or tight. The drawback to pulse-proportional was that the constant operation ate batteries and we were using the classic carbon-zinc flashlight batteries. (Alkaline? What’s alkaline?) When the batts gave out, the rudder went full-left and you spiraled in. No throttling back - no throttle. With escapement, you could run out of turns on the rubber loop (I did that but once) or the escapement could stick. My Esquire was set to fly in a big left turn, so I just had to follow it up the road where it generally lit on the long-abandoned Scudder dairy farm. I flew with a fellow who had pulse-proportional and he’d spiral into the field in front of us, which, fortunately, was, more or less, a swamp. It was rare for the models to he damaged to any serious extent. Bob did come back from one retrieval, though, covered in mud up to his hip pockets.

     See, that’s what happens when there’s no flying to report on; I ramble. This is being typed a good 10 days early because I’m off for Florida on the 12th. I’ll return with a bunch of old-airplane photos.

     Okay. This month was even worse than last. I have not seen anybody flying on the weekdays at all. I did miss a couple of weeks by being down in Florida, but since my return on 1/27, there has been no activity when I was at the field. I went up there twice, both times on days when it had begun to turn pretty bright by the house here in Northeast Eugene. On one occasion, the field was thoroughly shrouded in fog and on the other in a steady rain. Nobody else was there - and with good reason!

     I have only even heard about one happening and that was the demise of Wayne Wahrmund’s U-Can-Do. He tells me that the battery pack became unplugged and into the mud went the aeroplane. That new Saito .82, the apple of Wayne’s eye, was located a good foot down under the sod. Upon retrieval, the Saito was meticulously cleaned and lubricated before there was an attempt made to turn the shaft. I am happy to report that it was run on Chuck Jenkins’s test stand and seems none the worse for the ordeal. A new U—Can—Do is in the works and, yes, Wayne says that the holes in the cowl for needle, exhaust, et al. will be round. Good grief! somebody read last month’s column.

     If you are wondering how your columnist’s R/C project is going, (You were wondering, weren’t you?) I am now in the process of planking the front half of the Cavalier’s fuse-lage from the wing trailing edge forward. Planking involves laying on narrow strips of wood, all glued to the formers, stringers, and each other, until the area is completely covered. In this case, the strips are 1/8 x ¼ and the rea-son for the process is the compound curves that wider pieces of sheet wood could not handle. Some carving and a whole lot of sanding ensues, but the smoothly curved fuselage makes it worthwhile. Aft of the wing, the fuselage shape is kept by fourteen stringers covered, in this case, with silk.

     Down in Florida, I came across some interesting flying machines. At Pensacola, the Navy has on display a Brewster SB2A-4, a WWII dive bomber. Never heard of it, you say? Not too surprising; the Brewster Buccaneer was a sorry flop. Brewster was an ill—run company, so much so that President Roosevelt directed the Navy, in 1943, to take it over and straighten it out. The failure of the Buccaneer, however, was not all Brewster’s fault. The Navy, in its time—honored tradition, kept changing its mind and the company’s attempts to bring an already marginal design up to spec just made things worse. The SB2A’s fuel was in a number of small tanks. The addition self-sealing material cut the fuel load in half and the solution was a big new tank between the cockpits. This made the ship tail-heavy and the engine was moved forward 10” to compensate. Other difficulties followed and, in the end, the Buccaneers saw service only as

     205 “Bermudas” and scrapped most shortly after delivery. All that having been said, the Buccaneer is a handsome aircraft and that extended nose would make balancing a model easier. I’m looking at it as a possible Rubber Scale ship. A long nose is appreciated, because it gets more of the motor up ahead of the CG.

     At Polk City, Kermitt Weeks had acquired a Sikorsky S-39B. No, not a helicopter. Before the choppers, Sikorsky built flying boats, many of them amphibians. Pan Am flew Sikorskys before the Martins and Boeings came along. The S-39 was the single-engined amphibian and the one Weeks has is painted to resemble the S-39 that Martin and Osa Johnson flew over 60,000 miles in their explorations in Africa, taking off and landing on rivers and lakes. The wings and tail are silver, with the usual International Orange panel on the top of the wing, but the hull is painted like a giraffe. Years ago, I had this all schemed out as a Freeflight Scale ship, but the loss of my test field put paid the that idea. Mine was going to have the markings of the plane used by the New York American newspaper in the early 30s. I had good paint-and—markings details from a sheet that the American put out for modelers of the time.

     You may re!rtember the Gee Bee R—2 replica that Steve Wolf built in Creswell just about 19 years ago. That is now at Polk City along with replicas of the Model 7 and Model Y built by others. I missed the tour of the restoration shop
—    had the time wrong - so I don’t know how their P-35A and L-1 are coming along.

     Allegedly, there is some nice weather in the offing, so perhaps there will be a column of real news next month. For now, alas, this is it. I do have the pictures from Florida though and will bring them to the meeting, if you promise not to get tomato sauce on them.