ORIGINAL: adaptabl
I goes to show whats happening in our hobby. Last year some old fart was telling a new guy that real modelers built thier own planes and these AFR things were crap. He went on about the poor glue and cheap wood etc. Now this old guy builds O.K. but his planes are built too heavy. He oversizes wood and adds extra supports ect. His planes fly like the bricks they are(not to mention his flying skills were much better many years ago). Anyways I have not seen this new guy this year until last week I saw him flying in a field by himself. I stopped and talked to him. He said he was sick of some old guys always telling him his planes were crap. He is going to join back up but those 3 old farts better shut up or they will be looking for a new place to fly. There are many more of us ARF guys now. I have no problem with them flying the planes they spend many hours building but that does not make them any better. It's funny that any problems at the field involve those 3 guys. Time for them to shut up or start stamp collecting. We have other senior members that would do anything to help anyone at the field. Some don't fly very well anymore but thats O.K. they are great guys and I love to spend time with them at the field. Lets face it the hobby is changing just like everything else in the world. I would rather spend $200-$300.00 on a great looking/flying ARF that I can have in the air in 10 hours than spend $400.00-$500.00 on a kit,hardware,covering.etc that needs 100+ hours to build. If I turf an ARF I can buy another and fly next week. Without ARF's 90% of our club flyers would never be at the field flying.
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It has nothing to do with them being old, believe it or not. It has to do with their personalities. They were probably just as irritating to some when they were young guys. People are still people, even when they are old.
I think that every club has at least three characters that chase off new student pilots, quite unintentionally. My response to that is that if a new student pilot is chased off that easily, he/she probably wasn't a good club member candidate anyway. You simply cannot please everyone. It is a fact of life.
I was always more of a flyer than a builder. I built out of necessity. Why? Because no one else would build a straight enough model for me at a price I could afford. Otherwise, I would have given them the job. Some folks get a lot of pleasure from building. I do occasionally, but most of the time I would rather be flying or riding my motorcycle. I have a terrific shop with lots of tools, but building full time is not my thing.
Speaking of Don Brown (I hope it wasn't Dave Brown), I saw Don Brown for the first time at my first R/C club in NJ in 1970 or so. He and his teammates were putting on a demonstration of how well his new line of ARFs flew. Believe me, they flew well. I ended up flying a DB Beta for a year or so as a direct result of his demo. It was a clearly superior type of construction when compared to the Lanier rubber duckies of the day. Yes, that is just my personal opinion. Plus the Beta handled extremely well.
Let's not get a generational war going here. We need each other a great deal in order to keep our fields. Besides, I like young folks anyway, whether they build or ARF.