Midlife":2au0am45 said:
Neil, I had a cheap broken plastic green ready made Hurricane as my first control line plane, built another on a borrowed glowplug but couldn't afford the fuel.
I was given one of those Hurricanes as a present (Christmas or Birthday, can't remember which). I had already been flying control line for a while, so a brand new plane was superb.
All my engines were glow plug, and I didn't have anything bigger than .049. We had a fantastic local model shop, a real old place with models hung up all over the ceiling and a lovely old chap who owned it.
As I remember, a can of straight fuel used to have to last a week, and when we ran out of money / fuel, we used to make gliders with a 36" sheet of 1/8 balsa as the wing and everything else made from the scrap box. We never painted them and the towing hook was just a pin stuck into the profile fuselage. Some of them performed so well that we lost them, as they caught a thermal and were gone. When that happened we made chuck gliders out of bits from the scrap box.
As soon as we had some money, we'd get another can of fuel and the noise would start again. :mrgreen:
Our mecca in London was Henry J Nicholls, wow what a model shop that was.
There was also a constant trade in s/h engines in those days, which was pretty much the only way I could afford to buy them. Usually they were pretty 'tired' which made them hard to start and low on power, but they were what we could afford.
Happy days.