Best of luck with everything Mike!

Incidentally Donny, I see we've just topped 10,000 posts.

Bet you weren't expecting that when you first started the thread on 2nd December 2014!

I plan to. I would have worked with my father in law since he owned several businesses, but sadly we lost him two weeks ago today. Even more sad is it was a week before their 52 wedding anniversary. He was only 69, 12 years older than me, but he was still my dad. Damn cancer. Wife and I are making plans to visit a lake they used to go to and spread some of his ashes next year during our vacation to Texas.


Thats horrible. Chin up, all will work out OK.

Mike, best wishes to you and your wife.
acdii sorry about your loss, cancer does suck, lost my father in law 17 years ago to it.

Hi guys its been awhile since I posted anything here but have been lurking while reading all of your posts. Cancer is a real
pain in the butt, lost my brother in law to lung cancer a few months ago. He was a real heavy smoker who refused to quit until it was much too late. After quite a dormant spell the hobby urge is back so I'm back to flying and enjoying doing so.

Thanks Bill!

To be honest I am not sure what my thoughts were exactly but I became excited within twenty four hours of starting this thread.
it became one of the most pleasant, interesting, informative, yet familiar threads that I could have imagined, So many wonderful people with like experiences and interest that I felt right at home with one and all though I truly knew none. It is and has been a very warm and wonderful place to be. To me it proves how wonderful people truly are.

I can't believe it has been so long. I just looked back and I made post # 2. Since that time the more we posted the more we found out how much alike we are, we could be brothers or at the least best friends.

My sentiments exactly 👍

We are both!

As Red Green used to say: Remember, I'm pullin' for ya! We're all in this together! ;)

Yes, I only discovered this site a couple of years ago, but I felt like I was among old friends from the start. As I get older I find myself inclined to write down some of my memories for posterity. Here is one below:



I have heard model airplane guys tell friends not to throw a crashed model away immediately, but to let it rest for a while and let the hurt fade away. Many years ago (I was still in high school), one of our neighbors was an electronic engineer and R/C modeler. He was about 30 and far more advanced than I. I usually rode out to the flying field with him and observed his rare successes. One day he had a really spectacular crash and decided to remove all the hardware and burn the residue on the spot. That afternoon, Ken called on the phone and asked me if I was busy. So we rode back out to the flying field as he explained that he started looking at his home-made receiver to access damage and discovered that most of the tiny little springs had popped out of the eight mechanical relays. We found the funeral site by driving back and forth across the (about) 40 acre dry lake until we found the little pile of ashes. So there we were, on our hands and knees in the middle of a dry lake, digging through the ashes, trying to pick out those tiny little springs. I think we found them all, but we were not smart enough to realize what the heat had done to springs. I don’t remember if that receiver ever actually flew again. About that time the new Bonner Transmite relayless servos came out and Ken bought a set of relayless amplifiers for his servos and built a brand new all-transister (tubeless) receiver. That was a marvellous step up in reliability.

amen!!!

Your comment got me to thinking - curiosity meant that I just **HAD** to go back to see my first post. Came out at #47 - sooner than I thought it would be. And then, I re-read my own comment.

m-e-m-o-r-i-e-s.

I am humbled, there is no greater honor then to be considered your friend and brother!

https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.rcu...9c16e6322.jpeg
Gonna try to lighten this up before I get all teary eyed, this is a great thread like stated before and I look forward everyday to see what’s new. Got out the super sport store today and flew it for the first time in three years. Started right up and had three good flights. Skill building day with the wind!

Sportster, should have proof read🧐

I flew my Big Guff this afternoon, fitted with the Laser 62.

Jonathan Harper from Laser Engines provided some parts from the scrap bin after he'd volunteered to repair a stripped thread. He then rebuilt the engine and it ran very well. I had previously fitted a Laser 70 to the Big Guff, which had proved to be too powerful, besides I have other plans for the 70! I had to remove the slow-running needle of the 62, to adjust the position of the throttle lever but I adopted the trick closing the throttle and screwing in the slow-speed needle all the way then blowing through a clean piece of fuel tubing until I could just hear air escaping, but in my case, the fuel tubing was not that clean! I then fitted a 14 x 4 propeller.

This afternoon I had the opportunity to fly the model. I had anticipated having problems with the low speed setting but I need not have worried, the engine ticked over very well. There was not much difference between the performance of the engines. The model zoomed off the runway and having gained height it continued to fly for at least fifteen minutes at just above tick-over before I landed the model. I had not set the timer and there was still fuel in the tank. The whole flight was carried out at little more than tick-over, the landing drew applause from assembled clubmates. I even allowed my club chairman to fly the model and he's Mode 1 while I'm Mode 2!

I don't know how much power the Good Bros Brown Junior produced compared to my Laser 62, perhaps some engineer could enlighten me, but as Rolls Royce used to say, the power of the Laser was adequate!

Please note that Laser Engines does not normally repair old engines like my 62. I was very fortunate that Jonathan Harper took an interest in my engine and overhauled it in his own time.

David, glad to see you got some flying in too, it’s always satisfying to tinker with the engines and make them run good. Your fortunate to have someone like that around! Working on and fixing the glow engines is one of my favorite parts of this hobby.👍

While I was at the flying field yesterday I heard the distinctive sound of the Common Crane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_crane Looking up I saw a flock of about fifty birds flying south. These harbingers of winter were the first of many thousands which will be over-flying this region in the days and weeks ahead on their way down to the wintering grounds in North Africa and Southern Spain. They fly back north to Scandanavia and Russia in the Spring but we never see them in huge numbers in this area on their wayback. They must take a different route. It's probably something to do with atmospheric conditions.

So the seasons change and I'm of an age when I begin to wonder whether I will live to see them again next year.

Yes, none of us knows how much time we have left. It seems we all start to stare our mortality at this stage of life. Fall has finally arrive here, the forecast is for highs around 77 F or 25 C with lows in the 57 F or 14 C.

Sounds like this would be the time of year to vacation down to Texas. Too bad Skrull is in session.

Some three or four of us are going to go down to Gueret on Sunday to fly at their interclubs or fly-in. Temperature is forecast to be 18C or 65F with light winds. I plan to take the Big Guff, the Acrowot and the Russian Baron. Their dinners are not as good as ours but we'll manage! Unfortunately the screen on my camera has packed up but amongst our representatives will be a couple of camera buffs so I should be able to post some pictures of the event.

Have fun David!

I suppose that life for most of us consists of a series of minor problems which have to be dealt with. Sometimes these are quite big events involving lots of planning and organisation like moving from Texas to Philadelphia for example but mostly they're less imortant matters.

In no particular order these are the things which have been taking up my time over the last few weeks.


1. Helping Frans how to both build and how to fly. Sending his ARTF trainer kit back to the shop because one wing was nearly five millimetres thicker than the other. Did that motor shaft really bend in the last crash? Of course we cannot extract the shaft because a grub screw has proved to be impossible to undo. I'll have to see whether it can be drilled out and a new hole tapped.

2. Getting my mobile phone (cell phone) to work properly. My mobile phone service provider is La Poste, the French equivalent of the USPS. I kept on getting texts from La Poste urging me to register my details online. I went down to the mairie which doubles as the post office and asked the ladies there for their advice. They said that it was a scam and that La Poste would write a letter to me rather than send me a series of texts. It wasn't a scam! Now I can receive calls or texts but can't make or send any! I have an appointment at the mairie later today where all of this should be sorted out!

3. Completing my application for my residents' permit yesterday. This involved me driving the 40kms, (24 miles) to the Prefecture in the local administrative centre at Gueret. It's a big town, Gueret, 13,000 inhabitants! I find the traffic very intimidating! You'd never think that I'd spent eight years of my life living in London! I had to take my passport, proof of my address, the water bill in my case, and a recent passport-sized photograph. I got that done in a booth in the local supermarket on Tuesday. Everything went very smoothly. Copies were made of the documents, I was required to give a signature and to provide my fingerprints. To do this I had to place my hands one at a time onto a glass panel. I suppose that my fingerprints must have been recorded digitally, none of that ink and paper stuff. The very pleasant and efficient young lady told me that I would receive my card within four weeks. I thought that she was wearing too much eye make up. I must be getting old.

4. Settling-in the dog. She's fast asleep alongside me as I type this. When set free in an open field she loves to run from one end to the other for no real purpose other than the joy of being alive. She's a delight to see! Everybody at the club loves her.

5. Getting on with building the Mystic, (Post 9975) repairing one of the Barons and then there's that Chris Olsen "Uproar" I've been meaning to repair for so long. Preparing to go to the fly- in on Sunday. Selling a few models and kits. Next year will mark the twentieth anniversary of my best friend's death. He wasn't really an aeromodeller but he'd started to build a Flying Flea beore he died: https://www.sarikhobbies.com/product/mag148-hm18/. I plan to finish it. I would also like to build a quarter scale Fokker Triplane.

6. Clearing brambles and ivy, finishing off the garden path, turning over the vegetable patch before winter sets in, bringing up wood from the woodpile and storing it in the basement, again before winter sets in.

7. My new laptop will not open and the scan facility on my printer appears to be faulty. I need to contact my tame computer engineer.

8. The screen on my digital camera has packed up. It appears to be quite easy to replace according to a video on YouTube. I've ordered a new one from China. It should be here by 20th.

9. I am going through a lengthy and expensive bureaucratic process in order to register my 1974 Rover in France.

10. I must phone my Uncle Stan to find out how he's getting on. He's eighty-three. I'll ask him for Uncle Ivor's phone number, he's nearly ninety.


Of such things are our lives made up. Then suddenly life smacks you in the face with a big stick.

For the last five or six weeks my sister, Susan, and my brother-in-law Ian who are seventy-one and seventy repectively, have not been well. Ian is a competitive sportsman who still plays squash and golf. He has been suffering from sciatica. At times he has hardly been able to walk but fortunately the pain appears to have diminished. At least he can now drive a car.

Sue has been suffering from severe stomach pains. After an initial consultation her doctor arranged for her to have an endopscopie. This did not show anything untoward so he arranged for her to have a scan. For the last ten days or so I have been trying to contact her on Facebook Messenger but the two of us have never been online at the same time. I suppose I've been too busy with all of those things listed above. Last night she sent me a Message. She had received her diagnosis. It's pancreatic cancer. She's asked me not to phone until she "get's her head around" the situation.

Sue spent nearly all of her working life as a medical secretary and the diagnosis has not come as a complete surprise. She was careful what she ate and exercised regualrly. Both she and Ian were members of a walking group and thought nothing of a quick five miles before tea!

I'm not medically qualified but I believe that pancreatic cancer is one of the fastest acting and most painful of all of the cancers. I believe that in the end, even the most powerful drugs cannot mitigate the pain. For this to happen to my sister is very sad, especially for her, as she will not see her beloved grandchildren reach maturity. Looks like I will be going "home" for Christmas but I wouldn't bet on Sue being there the following year. Strangely enough we were never really close except for the last few years. I will send her some flowers by Interflora.

I woke at 4AM but could not get back to sleep. It's still dark here. The stars are beautiful. I'll take the dog for a walk at first light. If my mother were still alive she'd would have been ninety-nine years old today.

C'est la vie. Seize the time gentlemen, seize the time..