At 11:25 AM 8/9/00 -0400, you wrote:
> Fellas, this is a true story. Sometimes I kind of blur the line between
>truth and fiction, between the hallowed fact and hallucination as it were.
>That probably comes from the influence of some of my favorite writers, Mark
>Twain, James Thurber, Gordy Stahl, people like that. But this one is true,
>so help me Dave Thornburg.
> This summer when we went back to Muncie we took along one of his middle
>school buddies. Nostalgia/RES got rained out, so we wound up in the AMA
>museum in mid afternoon. The boys looked at stuff, played the flight
>simulators and then headed into the gift shop. They decided to spend some
>of their money on small balsa hand-toss gliders.
>
> Late in the day, Andrew and his buddy held an impromptu hand-toss glider
>contest in the back yard. The next day we were down in the basement and I
>showed him how to round the LE, taper the TE, round the fuse and saw off
>extra wood. The little 99cent toy glider began to fly better. Andrew said
>he wanted to build his own plane, and did I have any balsa?
<snip>
Great story. That's how real modelers are created. The story about
modifying toy hand launch gliders brought back memories of a similar
experience I had at the 1953 Nats.
In the summer of 1953, I had been accepted for Air Force Pilot training as
an Aviation Cadet. My brother and I drove up to Philadelphia, PA to attend
the Nats at Willow Grove NAS. We went mostly as spectators but I did take
my remaining free flight models and entered 1/2A, A, and B free flight. As
it turned out, I should have entered indoor HLG.
This was in the good old days of the Navy sponsored Nats and the Navy
provided a large hanger for modelers to work on their models. The hanger
was always full of modelers building all night for models to crash the next
day. I managed to hit the only obstacle within a mile in any direction
when my best free flight hit the big wind tethedral in the center of the
field. I was busy repairing the model in the big hanger that night when
Jim Walker came through handing out 10 cent gliders his company
manufactured. Naturally, an impromptu contest quickly arose. Everybody
began sanding and carving in an effort to improve performance and we were
soon getting flight times in excess of 30 seconds.
My first modification was to set the stab at zero incidence relative to the
wing. This considerably improved launch altitude but the camber molded
into the wing created too much drag. I wet the wing and flattened it with
a scrap board. Drying was speeded up by occasionally by holding the wing
against a light blub. When dry, I had removed the camber but had also
removed the dihedral. I cut the outer 1 inch off each wing tip and reglued
them at an angle to provide tip dihedral. The performance improvement was
remarkable. Flight times soon approached 1 minute if I could miss the
exposed hanger roof trusses on launch.
Jim Walker came back through the hanger during one of the better flights
and came over to inspect the model. He didn't say a word. He just held
the model for a minute and shook his head. I later found that my best
flight of 1:05 would have been good enough for third place if I had taken
it to the Lake Hurst airship hanger and entered Indoor HLG.
I tried several times to duplicate the modifications but was never able to
even come close to the performance of the original model.
Chuck Anderson
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