Last October (let’s see… that’s five months ago!) I started building a pair of Mini SpeedWings so Mike Nadler and Gary Morgan could join Dave North and me in foam-slamming combat sessions at Baylands Park.

I finally finished them last night and delivered them this morning.

Why did it take me so long?

Work was speeding along for a few days in October, then I made a mistake.

Carbon Fiber Reinforcement. I had the bright idea of embedding a carbon fiber rod along the leading edges of the wings to toughen them up.

Unfortunately, I chose a rod that was too thick, so it deformed the leading edges.

By the time I accepted my mistake, I had already covered one wing and was halfway done with the other.

I sighed, ripped off the covering and excised the rods.

Then I lost my momentum. The wings looked ugly. My rhythm was gone. I avoided the garage, where the poor tattered things were staring at me.

Soon it got cold, an extra good reason to stay out of the garage, which gets quite chilly.

Flipping Calendar Pages. Fall yielded to Winter and Winter became Spring.

Last weekend brought us a gorgeous Saturday, and finally I was in the mood.

So I rescued them from the garage, fired up my covering iron and resumed working on them.

This morning we installed receivers, programmed transmitters and launched the new wings into their first battle.

It was big fun.

Wing Pileups. At moments, all four wings converged in the same small airspace and mayhem seemed inevitable. But somehow they’d slide by each other as the pilots whooped with excitement.

There were several hits and at least two kills. Regular readers might recall that a kill results from a collision that causes one wing to crash to the ground, while the victor remains airborn.

I suffered three or four major crashes, all self-induced, because I lost track of my wing in the melee.

Each time, my eyes were glued to someone else’s wing when I realized that I couldn’t see mine. Once I heard an awful “thunk” behind me. The other times I neither heard nor saw my wing go down and had to search for it in the tree line.

My confusion reminded me of something I learned in the 1997 Errol Morris movie Fast, Cheap and Out of Control. The film profiles a lion trainer, a topiary sculptor, a mole rat researcher and a robot scientist.

The Magic Chair. At one point the lion trainer explains that he uses a chair to distract the animals because big cats can’t focus on four objects at once, and the four legs of a chair keep them distracted and confused.

I hope I’m not suffering from quadrophesia, to coin a word.

If it rains tomorrow, I’ll try a combat training session with the bottom of a chair.

Tags: Airplanes, Baylands, Combat, Crashes, Flying, People, Radio Control, Wings.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 6:47 pm and is filed under Baylands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.