"Lloyd E. Sponenburgh" wrote in message
. 3.70...

"RogerN" fired this volley in
om:

They seemed like pretty serious modelers, a
guy I flew with ran over a drum of fuel a year and was very
meticulous, he could fly the heli inverted near the ground, I saw him
barely scrape his blades once on the asphalt. You can call him a hack
but I figure he can fly circles around most "modelers", inverted
backward rolling circles or whatever.


That's a flyer. I've known some of them who could stunt rotary wings
that weren't even designed to fly upright; but some of those couldn't
build a folded napkin, instead buying what they flew. Some could.

Eye-hand coordination does not a modeler make; nor does it make a metal
craftsman. (helps, though).

Lloyd

It's a bit difficult to know how to rate a modelers modeling skills on a
helicopter, anyone that assembles the kit can have a heli that looks pretty
normal. This guy was pretty meticulous, balanced and adjusted everything to
perfection, loctite on the bearing races to the shafts, went extra miles to
assemble the heli to perfection.

The most skillful modeler I met was Tom Ingram, he lived in Mt Vernon when I
did. He was the Tom from Harry Higgley's book "Tom's Techniques" and also
"There are no Secrets". I didn't know he was that "Tom" when I visited his
home looking at models and admiring the craftsmanship. I found out he used
to work for Top Flite and was the builder of some of the models on the
advertisement and boxes of Top Flite models. When I saw him flying at the
field he had a Sig Kadet Senior and it looked like a show model.

To ramble on ... I used to have a FliteLine Scat Cat 500, I ordered the OS
front intake, rear exhaust engine because I wanted to put a pipe on it.
What came in was the OS 46 Ducted Fan engine, it was rear intake, rear
exhaust. Since it was a more expensive engine, I went with it anyway even
though I had to modify the plane for the rear intake. When it got in the
air and on the pipe, it was pretty fast, it was hard to tell if it slowed
down when pointed straight up, I'm sure it did though.

So the heli modeler that, like most others, used JB Weld on his YS-90
4-Stroke Heli engine exhaust fitting, maybe wasn't quite a Tom Ingram skill
level, he was probably a top 80-85% of model heli building skills. I've
seen kids trained by play stations that could fly the heck out of a model
helicopter, but they didn't know how to set them up properly or any of the
real life skills you get modeling that you don't get on video games.

RogerN