Dear Abufletcher and Idigbo:

The PIPE here yet AGAIN...and WHOOPS there,"Abu"...that's a photo of a FOKKER E I's nose you've got there (complete with its VERY early "überschlissig" Spandau MG, that COULD shake itself to PIECES from all those SLOTS in the cooling barrel)...if you check the number of CYLINDERS on that rotary engine in your photo, it's actually got SEVEN cylinders...NOT NINE...and ONLY the FIVE pre-production M.5K/MG aircraft (the SHOULDER winged quintet of the earliest Eindeckers, E.1/15 of Otto Parschau through E.5/15 of Kurt Wintgens) and the production E Is had the OBERURSEL U.0 seven cylinder engines...an EXACT CLONE of the Gnôme Lambda rotary, used in the earliest examples of the Bristol Scout C!!!

And Idigbo...I have GOT to ask...HOW did you get your dummy rotary SPINNING on what LOOKS like a D.H.2 in that "action" photo you've included with your post? I've been SERIOUSLY thinking of following the example of ONE British RC Scale expert who once built a Sopwith Snipe many years ago in a fairly LARGE scale, for FAI RC Scale World Championship competition, and made the dummy Bentley rotary in ITS cowl SPIN, on a pair of large diameter bearings (something like AUTOMOTIVE WHEEL roller bearings, one front and one rear)...and the dummy rotary was NOT bolted to the model engine's crankshaft in ANY way...but had clear plastic vanes fitted to each one of the dummy rotary engine's cylinders to allow the PROPELLER BLAST to spin the dummy rotary on the roller bearings, when the model engine was running...and with the RCV SP series engines now in existence-and with yours truly actually in the process of GETTING one of the 120 SPs over here in New England this winter for my upcoming Bristol Scout C in RC Giant Scale starting late next Spring-that old idea that I've mentioned here, that the long-ago British RC Scale builder used on his Snipe, is JUST TOO APPEALING to pass up for MY own uses...like a dummy Gnôme Lambda for Lanoe Hawker's Scout C No.1611, OR Kurt Wintgens' M.5K/MG E.5/15...or even a version of one of Glen Torrance's quarter scale Dr Is, done up just like COLE PALEN's first repro Tripe at OLD RHINEBECK...THAT one gets a spinning dummy Oberursel Ur II/Le Rhône 9J 110 hp rotary in ITS nose!!!

As far as scale PROPS go, most of the Windsock Datafiles have RATHER GOOD drawings of them contained in the scale drawings featured in each and every ONE of them...and as for the Ansaldo SVA 5 (it's the subject of Datafile No.40), thanks to LEO OPDYCKE, I've even got a BEAUTIFUL scale drawing of the prop for THAT beauty as well, from the pages of HIS WW I AERO quarterly publication!

This weekend I've GOT to get back to the DesignCAD drawing project of the Scout C...to MODIFY my old RC buddy HANK ILTZSCH's Scout D construction plans into those for Lanoe Hawker's No.1611...but I've GOT to know HOW you got that dummy rotary SPINNING, Idigbo...and ALSO what it was MADE from, so it COULD withstand all that spinning!!!

Hope to hear from you soon...

Yours Sincerely,

The PIPE!