LOL! Thanks Toad! You don't know how close I came to duplicating your PT19, right down to serial #'s and hubcaps. Only thing that stopped me was the incredible profusion of blue and yellow ARF PT19's cluttering the pit area at every warbird meet we go to. I felt it obligatory to do something a bit diffrent with the kit.
Gurn, yer gawdamned sack of negative karma is overfull again! No, I ain't one of those Cub herding geezers with an underpowered latex house paint finished sack of sticks grumbling at the youngins hanging over the runway on their props with their Rooski-glow engined trick-sticks. My crowd flies big scale warbirds, and mosta the stuff we play with would give yah a stiffie, if yah had a salamander of yer own in the first place.
When we see somebody hangin on the prop with a Lazer the fighter jocks light up the 1/3 scale Ponys and Jugs and start makin real fast close 150mph passes; in formation.... scares the hell outta the video game 3-d weenies.
This is my first BIG bird with a gas engine.. and I built it because I recognized I'd need the experience in building and flying highly loaded airframes with big gas engines before I moved onto a scale fighter.. and so far; every flight has been a learning experience. I ain't decided on the next bird yet, but I assure you it will be every inch of a classic WWII fighter and it'll knock yer socks off.
Thanks fer the kind words gents.. fer a long time there I thought I'd never get the damn thing outta the living room. Feels good to get it in the air.. when I stop my knees from knockin and my hands from shakin it does wonders for my enthusiasim for warbirds to actually build one and fly it. This ain't a suitable pastime if yah dislike risk tho.. this past weekend at Floyd Bennett field I saw three spectacular ships destroyed.. one to engine failure, 2 to pilot error.. all on the crosswind approach for landing. Small errors in judgement and timing.. instant re-kit.
"This is a catalog of TOY airplanes." ...to which the German indignantly replied, "A toy airplane is something you wind up that rolls across the floor. These are miniature actual aircraft."
LOL Les! one of my favorite movies. And yer right.. we face all the same dilemmas faced by full scale designers.. and as pilots we have the added handicaps of not being in the plane to 'feel' what is happening, plus the added nagging difficulty of flying 'scale' planes in 'unscale' air. The planes are smaller, but the air molecules ain't, which is why flying 'scale' warbirds has as high or higher attrition rate in the learning curve as the full scale pilots experienced. I've been building and flying smaller R/c birds for 25 years.. and even with all that experience, flying a big model warbird with a 30oz wingload is a whole different experience!
