I used to have a hobby, which I JUST HAPPENED TO SHARE WITH MY FIL. Whom my wife hated. Shit, I bought this house because of the extended air-er-football field across the street.
Since he died I’m stuck with YouTube or slot cars, which were fun but not my first love. She is always after me to get more exercise, but I assume one of the electric free-flights I have hidden away will offend her.
Fuck it. I have a 2-meter wing in the crawl space, a fair idea of how to design a fuselage and empennage, and a .049 Glo-Bee to take it aloft. For a while. Thermals die here about when I get home from work. Not explained in the ReMax listing.
All I need is a legal radio and a lot of balsa. I may even need to redesign around basswood because the shop at the end of the block is devoted to…(shudder)…model railroaders. I can do it, though it’s brittle. I mean, the same professional furniture magazines had me cutting out The Wood of the Month. Teak? Mahogany? At 1/16" sizes I can work it out. Except it’s in my trunk. And has been for 12 years.
Honest to God, nobody formally asked since 1999. I was just keeping up with Wood Porn. And it required transfers from one to a couple 'nother trunks.
When I was a kid I built a Midwest Models Super Sniffer that was powered by an .049. Lost it on its first flight. Later I built an .020-powered Sniffer. I did the dethermalizer this time. Still had to hop on my Enduro to fetch it. I have at least one, and I think two, unbuilt Sniffers in a box somewhere. Unlike the Mojave Desert, this place has tall trees and rather moist bays. Not a great area for free flight. Radios and servos are much smaller now than they were in the '70s. Maybe one day I’ll build my plane(s) and put radios in them so I don’t lose them in a tree or in the water.
And I have at least two boxes of unbuilt Guillow’s models. 24" wingspans on some of them. There’s a Cessna 172 Skyhawk with a 36" wingspan. I’ve read online that people put electric motors and radios in these, and they fly pretty well. I think I’d build the WWI models for display, though. I know I have one Guillow’s kit stored away called the ‘Arrow’. I built one of those once, and it’s the best-flying rubber-powered model I ever built. And then there are the two or three boxes of Estes rockets…
Alas, I don’t have the time to re-start my hobby, and no space to display them.
Cox was sold to Estes in 2006. Estes/Cox Models stopped making engines early in 2009. They sold their existing inventory, and two companies are selling new engines and parts. But I haven’t heard if new engines will be produced. So once the existing inventories are gone, electric will be all there is.
Ohh… I haven’t done it in years, but I remember having great fun with model aircraft powered by a Cox .049. The glow plug and battery, the fuel, the scream of the engine, and the distinctive aroma of the exhaust. Good times.
We only flew control-line aircraft, but those were fun. We’d design our own aircraft out of balsa–sometimes they’d fly, sometimes not. And we’d do “carrier takeoffs” from picnic tables. Occasionally, we’d even manage a carrier landing!
Lots of fun. Even though I haven’t flown one in years, I’d be sad to see the Cox .049 disappear.
Searched for my TD .010 a while back (wanna make fun of an .049? try working with something a fifth its size) but I couldn’t find it.
Always wanted to fly a Sniffer, but couldn’t afford the radio. No point in throwing away an aircraft, as the Good brothers taught us.
Also have some Guillows, but FIL was the one who got me into Cross & Cockade. I have no doubt that I told of the dinner he couldn’t make so I picked up a Profile of the Fokker D-VII for him and the wizened German guy next to me said, “Chew know, I chused to fly those.” But with a color inkjet printer I should have no problem creating lozenge-pattern camouflage to scale. Er, when she’s at work.
They aren’t going anywhere, being indestructible. It’s what garage sales are for. FIL dumped some earlier brands on me, like a couple K&Bs. They lit up, but that seems to be easy when you are burning methanol.
Trying to remember a recipe for Half-A Diesels that involved moth balls. Besides:
“My house smells like moth balls.”
“How do you get their little legs so far apart?”
I’ve been here since 2000. I do not leave a straight line except as a gift.
The Sniffer and Super Sniffer don’t need radios. The only reason I lost the Super Sniffer is because I neglected to build the dethermalizer. The way it works is this: The horizontal stab is joined by its leading edge with a rubber band to the fuselage. At the rear is a bent wire hook on the stab and the fuselage. A light rubber band keeps them together. Between the hooks, and held by the rubber band, is a length of slow-burning fuze shoved into a metal tube. You expose a length of fuze for however long you want to fly (usually until the fuel runs out). Light the fuze, and let the plane fly. When the burning fuze reaches the rubber band on the hooks, the rubber band snaps. The stab is pulled upward causing the model to stall so it doesn’t get away.
You can buy Super Sniffer plans or a ‘short kit’ here.
As it happens, a couple/few of my kits require lozenge camo…
I was watching 300, trying to find reasons to tell a bunch of old ladies that “It’s overblown, but this is part of your Western Culture, too,” but only falling back on, “It’s Gerard Butler; oiled up.” It might work, but I bailed and went to a Park Flyer website.
I mean, I love the smell of partially-burned methanol and castor oil, but those guys are having fun. Imagine a Sniffer catching a thermal over one of our several baseball fields, shutting down the motor, and riding it until you get scared and bring her down.
You’d be unimpressed by the “wood,” as it’s balsa. Y’know how, when a comic actor gets whalloped over the head with a chunk of wood and does not die? It’s balsa. Extremely light, surprisingly strong lengthwise, and the perfect thing with which to make model airplanes.
Well, that depends on how you look at it. The Cox .049 was nothing more than a tiny diesel. So it would be correct to say that Cummins and Caterpillar and Detroit Diesel are making glow engines.
There are tons of glow engine manufacturers. With the loss in interest in control line flight, there’s really no market for them. Radio control is the most popular form of hobby flight, and planes that are built for .049s are too small to be very practical. They don’t handle wind well and are difficult to see. Most planes are in the 4’-5’ wingspan range and are designed for .40-.46 sized glow engines.
Not that you can’t get an .049 Select Hobbies
Brodak makes an .049
You can buy NOS Cox engines at that site.
You can also buy .061 throttled engines from AP ( I have two of those) for small scale planes with full radio control.
Electric planes are getting more and more popular, but I’m sticking to my noisy slimy planes as long as possible!
