It's ready for test flights.

Another new design.

The Swizzle Stick was an old r/c design that was cheap and easy to build. That came to mind when I had a usble wing to play with. O don't know what category it will fall into as it has no fuselage to speak of, like the Swizzle Stick, and it's too wide to be in the profile category. I'll think of something.

Winter stuff.

The Oriental kit I won in the raffle is built and flying quite well. The local hobby shop had a kit from and estate sale for sale at less than half price of a new kit so I bought it. I figured that I had already built one this should be easier. It was about the same to build and is waiting for the kit of the Yak-9 to be finished so I can clear coat both at the same time with the last can of 2 part spray that I have. Hopefully there is enough to do the job. Our son has been getting the hot rod ready for a "drag and drive" scheduled for the end of Feb. at the local drag strip. It's a 3 day event using the same track so there isn't any hotels to pay for. He is planning on bringing his camper to the track for the overnights. We have been testing and tunning at the track trying to get the Holley Sniper fuel injection working properly. He finally got it clost to what it did on the first ever pass that bent the rear suspension. This starts on Feb.28.

Good idea, bad planning.

A couple years ago I had a flat tire on my Dodge pickup. I wasn't home and had to use the scissor jack that comes with the truck. It took a long time to get the flat tire off the ground and changed. After that I figured that a small hydraulic bottle jack would be much better at lifting the future flat tire off the ground with a lot less effort. I didn't have the chance to try it out on a flat but whenit came time to rotate the tires I gave it a try. It did the fob but was very slow pumping up. After that excercize I realized that the bottle jack just fit under the front "A" arm with the tire at full inflation. If the tire was flat the jack would be useless and I'd be stuck having to use the scissor jack again. I looked at Amazon for small floor jacks and they had one that would fit the bill. I asked my son about a small jack and he pointed at the one he had and we had used at the drag strip. He got it at Harbor Freight. I went to the Harbor Freight store in Zachary, La and bought two of them, one for each truck. I'm ready for a flat now.

Trouble at the hangar.

Last year I was given three O.S. S-35 engines. I didn't really have a need for them at the time. I also got 2 more Brodak .40 engines that came to be a real good engine for my small designs. I put one of the 40's in my Jamison old time stunt plane to replace the heavier more powerful LA .46. Then I won a kit of the Dee Rice designed Oriental. I never had one and it turned out to be a good flying plane. The plans show a Fox .35 engine whick is very light at 6.5 ounces. The LA weighs around 9 ounces. The plane camne out quite light at 40 ounces so I decided to install one of the Brodak .40's and remove the LA .46. That was just what the Oriental needed as the performance improved quite a bit. Then I got the idea to install one of the .35's into one of the small models, my design "Wild Thing".I flew that and it's another winner. The local hobby shop had a kit of the Oriental on the shelf at about half price so I bought it. I'm about half way through framing it up and I needed to install the engine to move along with the fuselage. I amd going to use the Brodak 40 in this plane so I went to the Jamison that I had put one in and removed the engine and installed it in the Oriental fuselage. A couple hours later i remembered that I had removed the Brodak and installed a .35 in the Jamison and them used it to mark and drill the mounting bolt holes. I didn't realize that I was using the wrong engine until too late. When I got home I removed the brodak from the first Oriental and fitted it into the new Oriental. Luckily the holes are the same for the O.S. 35, the LA 40/46 and the Brodak 40. Even the spinner clearance is good for both engines.