Wow, that is sad. RIP and thanks for all the great "stuff" you built. Just a couple of minutes before reading this thread, I had come upstairs from the shop where I had been fondling my modest .15 collection and thinking about small, simple RC speed planes: ST G .15 (rectangular offset intake with plastic insert, side exhaust), RV .15 (in nice shape but still missing the venturi and n/v), an OPS speed .15 FISE R/C, a Cox made Conquest FF, and a somewhat rare AD .15 FIRE (an FAI engine made in lots of about 20 annually and which won FAI in the mid '70's) with a huge intake diameter, real purty and I'd like to run it but not crack it up. I have a handful of the requisite OS .10/.15's and a couple of Medallions too, boring.

ST memory:

The engine I coveted as a young kid was my big brother's (also RIP '02) massive and terrifying (to a pint size kid scared to start Babe Bees) Super Tigre .56. He had apparently upgraded the carb to a Mk something or other, it was pretty trick. I remember holding it reverently and flipping the prop over and over - he did oil it carefully and it was broken in well ;-) - and the picture of the prop is also etched in my brain, a yellow Tornado 12-6 nylon as I recall.

It was this engine that powered a big "FF" airboat he built at university, glassed foam maybe 18x48x1-1/2" with the engine up on a pylon with a small Perfect FF tank. Very small thankfully. One fine summer day, blue sky, light wind, puffy clouds at our old cottage circa 1967, there were maybe 5 of us in our little flat bottom river boat called (seriously) the "Stinkpot". It had an inboard one cylinder two stroke, some ancient thing that was restored nicely by my father, and had nice red and green enamel on it's tank and cylinder etc. And, a handle with a plastic grip you could hang on to while you pulled frantically at the recoil starter. It ran well enough, although it could often be a bit balky to start. It was coupled directly to the shaft via a universal jopint. No transmission or disengagement mechanism of any kind, you started the engine and went. To stop you stopped the engine. Specifically, to stop in order that your big brother can launch his new ST .56 powered free-running airboat in the middle of the lake, you stopped the engine..

He fired this beast up while I hid behind my sister and covered my ears - open exhaust, yikes! He let it loose from our little boat with it's tiny Perfect tank of fuel and off it went, roaring and skipping over the lake beautifully and stably in a huge wide arc. An arc is part of a circle, and we were on the perimeter of that circle, and things started looking bad for us. As it swung around in a good impersonation of the Doomsday machine swinging around on the Constellation as Kirk gawked through the viewer, panic broke out - Holy crap, it's heading right for us!!! Brrrp, brrrrp, brrrrp, brrrrrp, brrrrp, brrrrp, of course the engine was enjoying all this far too much and refused to start.

Steering was accomplished by a good sized rudder hinged on the transom center, but a bit oddly operated by a pair of cables that came up the port side as a parallel pair, then were looped around a pulley perhaps 6" in diameter pivoting on the gunwhale, with a little crank handle. So, to turn to port you rotated one way, to starboard the other, and it worked well enough at the 3-4 knot speeds the boat travelled at while coughing blue smoke out it's smokestack. This was the most interesting feature of the boat - perhaps 6" tall and 3" diameter, it was fabricated from thinwall steel tubing and welded to a steel baseplate anchored to the floorboards. The top was uniquely crowned outwards like Jughead's hat, and the whole affair was painted flat black. The engine exhaust was piped into the side through a a hole, and exited in little whiffs out the top that you could see in the evening. Mr. Haney would have been pleased. We loved it, it was great fun and was in fact a very functional and effective river boat and was used frequently as such.

It also had oars, but we had of course shipped those and tucked them under the seats to run the boat. So, back to the boat... as the boat roared towards us, my father figured he could propel this portion of the family to safety by pumping the rudder frantically, and managed to swing it for a few cycles as we yelled in terror, but we all knew there was no way were we going to accelerate out of the way. Thank goodness for the small tank - it brappped out of fuel maybe 50 feet from us and skimmed to a stop. After a sigh of relief, the next thing heard was a loud yell - "Ian!!!". It was one of the funniest things I can remember, and of course it all happened in a few seconds.

MJD