Archive for April, 2007

The Life Aquatic

Sunday, April 29th, 2007

Slow Stick Flying Over Lake Hennessey

Saturday, Gary and I drove north into Wine Country, seeking not wine but water.

Gary packed two Slow Sticks into his truck, one with a pair of standard GWS styrofoam and plastic floats, the other with a honkin’ big central float carved out of glued-together pieces of Blue Core foam and two smaller wing floats.

He’s flown both on the grass at Baylands, where floats work better than wheels for most planes.

I don’t have any planes with floats. Instead, I brought my two current favorite flyers, both of which weigh less than 7 ounces: a Mini Speed Wing and a blue foam space cruiser. They’re so small they can fly just about anywhere.

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The Impulse to Explain

Friday, April 13th, 2007

Ron’s Starfighter

This little blue foam Starfighter was created by Ron Fikes. It flies great!

I walk into a room.

A guy I know asks me about something he read about on the Internet.

Two guys I don’t know stand around, listening.

I tell the guy I know what I’ve read about it. I tell him what I think about what I’ve read. I talk for maybe a minute or two.

When I finish, one of the guys I don’t know asks me if I’ve experienced the event that I read about.

I say no.

“Then you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

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The Three-Nickel Solution

Monday, April 2nd, 2007

Nickels on the Nose of the Scrappy

Sunday was nice and warm and I enjoyed prowling through my garage, looking for a plane to resurrect from the fleet of incomplete and damaged aircraft awaiting a bit of attention.

A small wing caught my eye: a 24-inch Wing Warrior Scrappy that I built last year. It came with a small brushed motor, a Johnson 250.

Last year I set everything up and tried to fly it, but I never got it balanced. So my flights were quite short and always ended in crashes.

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