John raises an excellent topic in his last post. This is an area where the
woody guys and I agree. I too have wondered; how does a newbie to RC get
into soaring? And especially; how does he get into the kind of soaring
competitions that I participate in? I don't have the answer.
There are a few guys in our club and nearby clubs who fly woody type
airplanes. At our annual CASA Open contest we have even held an RES class to
entice them to compete. One problem that arises is that the winches we use
now are not well suited for woody type models. A stock Gentle Lady has real
trouble lifting 800' of 220lb test line with a retriever line along for the
ride. It gets worse if you ask that Gentle Lady to do it without the risk of
breaking it's wing. So to even hold an RES class you need to set up a
special winch with light line and probably a low power setting.
So I guess guys could learn to fly RC with park flyers then transition to
inexpensive woody type soaring models. They could start in competition with
woody contests which is why I am all in favor of seeing this aspect of
competition succeed and grow. A certain percentage of those guys would have
the interest and money to transition to composite soaring models.
To answer John's question: I think it might be less than 10-20% scratch
builders that enter the NATS. The way things are going, it won't be long
before it will be hard to find guys who can even put together an ARF model.
I don't know what to do about that other than being a resource for that type
of information. Certainly the internet makes it easy for people to get the
information needed to learn how to scratch build.
So there are some random, unconnected, incomplete thoughts. I need to get
back to the shop now.
Phil
RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and
"unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe
messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. Email sent from web based email
such as Hotmail and AOL are generally NOT in text format
