18b court m, brick, nj 08724 july 2020 a lifetime of balsa

Ocean County Modelers By-Lines & Fly-Lines

18B Court M, Brick, NJ 08724 July 2020

OCM: A Gold Level Leader Club

W hen one gets to the age of being quali-fied as an old fogey, there comes a

time when you start to reminisce about how you got started in this hobby and what it was that kept you so interested for all those many years. As we look around us, we again keep won-dering what we can do to interest young peo-ple in learning how to build and fly model airplanes. I have come to the conclusion that there must be a certain spark that is ignited either by a person, an event, or a very moti-vated author. Kids of today have such an abundance of external enticements; they flit from one thing to another, and never really get the full-bodied flavor of any particular, so to speak. Sports are so diverse in the schools that they can consume a youngster, so there is no time left over for other things like model building or flying. I was born at the start of the Great Depres-sion, which heralded a time of great personal deprivation and struggle. We have all heard and some of us have lived during that time, and I feel confidant in saying that we would like to never go back. However, there was a greater simplicity to our lives then, and a whole lot more personal interaction. My dad was able to keep the family going with being

A Lifetime of Balsa, Glue,

and Dreams

by Bob Shernick

a house painter, but keep in mind that he was coming down from being a nationally recog-nized fine arts muralist. He was lucky to make about nine to twelve dollars a week, and that was it. A boy growing up during those days was just as curious and precocious as they are now or were before, but there was one great excep-tion. If you wanted something to play with, or got tired of climbing trees, playing hide and seek, kick the can, etc, you had to figure out how to make it. Thinking back on that kind of demand now, convinces me that it gave me the ability to create something from practically nothing. One soon learned that what appeared obvious from one point could be thought of from a different viewpoint and made into something else. A case in point; there was an open-air fruit and vegetable market about a mile away from where we lived on the west side of Denver. My folks, my brother, and I would walk up on a Saturday, and do some modest shopping there. As a boy of six or seven, I was not in-terested in the quality of peaches or apples, but did love to rummage around in the back of the tent area in their scrap pile. There they

see Balsa, page 2

PRESIDENT Dave Sopronyi 609-658-6919

[email protected]

VICE PRESIDENT Ray Whitehead Jr

732-801-7814 [email protected]

TREASURER

Bill Massa 732-581-6560

[email protected]

SECRETARY Vacant

SAFETY OFFICER Frank Renda


NEWSLETTER EDITOR Sue Fevola


Ocean County Modelers

Club Officers

OCM Meeting

Meetings

are on hold due to the pandemic.

E-Mail notice

when meetings can be resumed.

see Balsa, page 3

Balsa, from page 1

had such things as grape baskets with delightful thin wood, and wire bales. Asking if I could have a couple of them, I would later take them apart very carefully, and then go through a process of soaking and flattening the wood, using bricks or boards with stones on top. Once I had the raw materials, I could then use one of my dad’s castoff razor blades, and follow my hand-drawn lines for a profile fuselage, the wing, and the tailpieces. My first efforts were very crude, but I gradually learned how to think about design, proportion, and even introduce some degree of realism with colored pencils or watercolors. One day, in the middle of summer, my attention was drawn to the sky above Denver where I observed something happen-ing that I never thought possible. An airplane was flying quite high, but it was creating a line with smoke. As I continued to watch, the pilot would turn on the smoke, and cut if off while forming the letters of the drink Coca-Cola. I went to bed that night dreaming that maybe one day I might have such a won-derful job like that pilot. I saw more airplanes gradually fly-ing nearby as World War II began. As the country became deeply involved with the war, more of my attention started to focus on heroes in airplanes, and I set out on a plan that later became a formidable task. I had decided to model one each of all the fighter airplanes in the war. You could buy model kits for as little as 15-25 cents that were made by Guillow and Cleveland model companies. For a 10-12 year-old boy, they might as well have cost $10, but I managed to scrimp and save, and do odd jobs to buy a few. Many times, the balsa was pretty inferior and had hard spots in it. Many of the cheaper kits were made from a very poor grade of basswood and had the lines printed on the wood. I would have given anything to have an X-Acto knife back then. I soon discovered there was a fascinating world of read-ing in a magazine called Model Airplane News and I kept all my issues for reading; reading and rereading them over and over. Through that magazine, I learned how to do tissue covering, build lighter, and how to construct models that actually flew. Those were exciting times and I can remember building one airplane that flew at the end of a fishing pole. I spun around in circles, making me so dizzy that I was sick for hours, but I would get up and do it again because that airplane could actu-ally fly! I cracked it up many times, but thanks to a big tube


of Ambroid cement, I stuck it back together. It was a continual habit, incidentally, to sit in class at school and peel Ambroid cement off my fingers. I tried doing rubber-powered airplanes and had lots of fun with them, but the sheer joy of building a glider was the most fun and best learning experience. I probably would have gotten into CL flying earlier if I could have afforded a lot of equipment, but a good Ohl-son & Rice engine during the late 1940s went for a hefty $19.95. I would have to save a long time to get half of that. Besides, I could now keep a glider flying that was my own scratch-built design by just buying some better-quality balsa, and learning things like how to balance and build lighter. RC was just beginning to be talked about in the magazines, but it was not until the late 1950s that I ever saw an airplane fly with that kind of equipment, and even then, the trans-mitters and receivers looked like jury-rigged chunks of tubes and wires. By this time, I had quit being a loner and met some other fellows who taught me how to do CL flying, but even then, I still did not really feel comfortable with the tethered aircraft. Sailplanes had a certain majestic, pure flight, regal aura about them, and seeing a few full-scale sailplanes in flight one day made my heart pound and shiv-ers run up my spine from their sheer beauty. I had had a ride once in a Piper Cub that was fun, but there is just no comparison to a fully dressed sailplane. Naturally, when the Korean War came along, and I was about to be drafted, I joined the Air Force, and spent quite a bit of time in airplanes, but never learned to be a pilot. I never sat in a sailplane nor was I ever affluent enough to charter a ride in one. No, I look back on it now, and really love the memory of all those cold winter nights crouched over my building table down in the basement next to the warm furnace. Learning what chord, empennage, dihedral, ailerons,

Balsa, from page 2

etc. were about, and then the sheer joy of watching that new bird stay up in the sky, if only for a little while. I have come a long way from the time of the grape baskets, but I have a tremendously long way to go yet. It wasn’t until I joined the Pine Peaks Soaring Society that I realized just how much more I needed to know. All the guys were so very patient with me, trying to get my brain and transmitter to work together in this new challenge…an honest-to-goodness flying kind of sailplane that could become a speck up there if you just learned how to “see” ther-mals, or watch the hawks. It makes all those years of Ambroid cement on the fingers have some meaning about quality time. [Reprinted from The Tailwind, Henndersonville R/C Club, Hendersonville, TN, 9/2017]

July Flying Days

Fri, July 3rd Saturday, July 4th Sunday, July 5th

No flying on Sat 11th, Sun 12th

Flying Sat, Sun, July 18-19th

July Sat, Sun, 25-26th


Spending the 4th flying at the field

photos by Sue Fevola

Lou Capurso

photo by Sal Piu

Joe Acquisto

I drove out to the field on Saturday, the 4th of July and I was pleasantly surprised to

see about a dozen or so members there, some flying and some just relaxing. I took a couple of photos of some really cool looking planes, along with their pilots, but unfortunately the battery in my phone died, so I wasn’t able to get everyone. Next time.

Sal Piu

Joe DiBella


T he stall, or more accurately the inadvert-ent stall, has probably caused more RC

planes to crash than any other cause. The safety of your airplane depends on your knowledge of its slow-speed handling and stall characteristics. To minimize the number of crashes due to stalls, the pilot must under-stand the principles of what makes a plane fly and how to make practical use of the infor-mation. First, we must understand how the wing supports the plane in flight. As the plane moves through the air, the amount of lift is determined by the particular airfoil and its angle of attack (AOA). The AOA is the angle formed by the wing’s chord line and the on-coming air stream. The other primary factor in the amount of lift is the speed of the airfoil through the air. A stall will occur when the AOA exceeds the wing’s critical angle of at-tack. At this angle, the lift suddenly decreases and the drag increases, resulting in the plane losing altitude very rapidly. The pilot has control over the AOA with the elevator. For example, if the pilot inputs up elevator the tail drops and the nose rises, which increases the wing’s AOA. An important point to note is that the plane can be moving in any direction, including straight down, and a stall will occur if the AOA is exceeded. The only way to recover from a stall is by decreasing the angle of attack below the criti-cal angle by pushing forward on the elevator. By learning your plane’s slow-speed and stall behavior, you should be able to avoid getting into an unintentional stall situation in the first place. Take your plane up high; reduce the throttle while increasing the elevator deflec-tion to maintain your altitude. As it slows, note how the plane reacts to your control in-puts, and when it does stall, note if a wingtip drops or if it stalls straight ahead. Recover from the stall by lowering the nose to gain flying speed. Adding power will speed the

recovery and minimize altitude loss. Practice this until you can recover with the wings level. All models stall differently, so you’ll want to learn your model’s characteristics. Spins are an exciting aerobatic maneuver when done intentionally, but an unintentional spin close to the ground will spoil your day. A spin cannot occur unless the plane is stalled. If at the moment of stall there is a yawing mo-ment, an autorotation will commence. The spin is caused by a complex series of events. If rudder is applied as the wing stalls then it will cause one wing to drop. For instance, if left rudder is applied with up elevator, the left wing will move downward and rearward re-sulting in a left roll. The left wing will there-fore have a greater angle of attack and slower speed relative to the right wing. The right wing will essentially be less stalled than the left wing resulting in autorotation about the spin axis. In the fully developed spin, the aer-odynamic and inertial forces are stabilized into a predictable pattern of rotation. The rotation, airspeed and vertical speed are stabilized and the descent path is vertical. Unless something is done, the spin will continue. Turns in the landing pattern can lead to spins if a skidding turn is attempted. A skid is when too much rudder is used for a given bank an-gle. Often a pilot will use rudder when over-shooting the turn in order to avoid a steep bank angle. This is the recipe for a spin. If you find yourself in a spin, most planes will recover easily, by letting go of the controls and letting the speed build up. Some high-performance planes require opposite rudder and/or down-elevator to recover. Use caution during the recovery as the speed can build up quickly. Also avoid a secondary spin during the recov-ery by not using excessive up elevator. Every plane has its own peculiar spin characteristics, so make sure you try spin recovery at high alti-tudes. [Model Airplane News, 5/4/2017]

Stalls and Spins

Tips and

Tricks


President’s Comments

T he weekend of June 27th-28th, we had two nice days of flying. There was a

nice crowd both days for a sit-down meal with plenty of food which everyone enjoyed. We had guests from Levittown Aerobugs and the Pine Barrens club to join us for the picnic. The Timber Night was won by Rich Cuny and the other eight prize winners were noti-fied and received various items; chargers, LiPo batteries, battery testers and digital bat-tery alarms. Congratulations to them and thank you for all who participated. A special thank you to Mike Figler and Bill Massa for all their help with the preparation for the picnic. A thanks goes to Bill Massa for replacing the hinges and closer spring on the mens- room door.

Instrument panels An easy and cheap way to obtain an instru-ment panel for that sport model is to look through a full-size airplane magazine for an advertisement showing instruments. I found one I liked and used my scanner to scan the image into the computer, and then pasted it into my word processor, scaling it to different sizes. This could also be done using a copy machine that will reduce. If using the com-puter, any size can be easily scaled, and I printed out several different sizes to have on hand. The ones I did were in black and white, but if you have access to a color scanner and color printer, some really nice instrument pan-els can be created this way. You also could add color to black and white copied instru-ments using markers or colored pencils so they look more realistic. [from Mark Kallio]

Glasses and paint Do you wear glasses? Do you spray paint your models? The next time you do both at the same time, try this. Stretch a piece of Sa-ran Wrap over the glasses using some Scotch tape to hold it in place. Now when you finish painting, simply peel off the Saran Wrap and you’ll have glasses you can still see through. Using safety goggles is another idea.

Wire bending When bending identical parts from small gauge wire, tape the wire together and bend both simultaneously.

Vinegar To remove epoxy from yourself safely, use white vinegar. It’s smelly, safe, and very cheap!

by Dave Sopronyi

Flight Humor It is the ultimate in bad manners to run over someone else’s plane when backing out of the parking area, unless that plane is the only one with half a chance at beat-ing you in the next contest.

Rock, plane eating tree, or dumb thumbs?

18b court m, brick, nj 08724 july 2020 a lifetime of balsa

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