October 12th, 2009
Helicopter Nose. Photo by Mike Bowns.
We kicked off the year’s indoor flying season Friday evening in a cavernous City of Sunnyvale gymnasium.
Don Cohn, administrator of the BayRC discussion forums, organized the event, which drew close to 20 flyers. Most popular plane: ParkZone Vapor. Most popular helicopter: E-Flite Blade mSR.
In this photo I’m flying an E-Flite Blade mCX helicopter, which is also quite the rage.
Each helicopter weighs about an ounce.
The mCX is remarkably stable, easy to fly even for a novice.
So my nose-high hover is hardly amazing.
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Tags:
Flying,
Helicopters,
Indoors.
Posted in Elsewhere | 3 Comments »
October 7th, 2009
A medicine bottle carries batteries for E-Flite aircraft.
My current favorite aircraft are quite small, weighing just an ounce or so.
Their batteries are small, too, single-cell lipos rated at 120mAH.
As a battery carrier, I’ve adopted a pill bottle. It holds a bunch of them.
Oscar Yatco was quite amused when he saw them. “You’ve got to put this on your blog,” he said. “Just take one in the morning and you’ll feel great!”
Tags:
Baylands,
Flying,
People.
Posted in Baylands | 4 Comments »
July 17th, 2009
A wide piece of masking tape holds the wires in place.
In the course of adding a brushless tail motor to a little Walkera helicopter, I had to solder three very small pairs of wires together.
The first solder joint went OK, but as I started to work on the second pair of wires, the first joint came undone.
Then I realized two things:
- That I should immediately reinforce solder joints with shrink tubing.
- That I got lucky the first time.
Try as I might, I couldn’t calm my shaky hands sufficiently to solder another pair.
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Tags:
Helicopters,
Tools.
Posted in Home | 3 Comments »
June 23rd, 2009
Dennis pivoted the wings on carbon fiber rods, rotated by servos.
Many of us fly cheap airplanes, but few fly anything as cheap as the Multiplex Fox.
Looking a bit like a scaled-down Multiplex Easy Star, it’s sold as a $15 glider: no motor, no control surfaces. Throw it hard and high and wait for it to come down.
But it looks so much like a small version of the planes we fly that inevitably people began tinkering with it.
Matt Abrams had the first one I saw. His was blue, a work in progress on the day I saw it at the PCC airfield.
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Tags:
Airplanes,
Baylands,
Combat,
Flying.
Posted in Baylands | 3 Comments »
June 13th, 2009
A novel about a writer who moves through the world of special interests.
Acrobats, Beekeepers, Campers, Divers, Fossil Hunters, Glass Blowers, Hikers, Kite Flyers, Lego Builders, Model Railroaders, Numismatists, Orchid Growers, Poker Players, Rollerbladers, Skydivers, Tinsmiths, Videographers, Wind Surfers…
We live in a world of enthusiasts, special interests who flock to their own websites, discussion groups, activities and magazines.
My friend Charlie Haas has written a novel, The Enthusiast, about Henry Bay, a writer who works for magazines of this sort. Bay jumps from specialty to specialty, learning the language and meeting the players.
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Tags:
Life,
People,
Writing.
Posted in Elsewhere | 2 Comments »
