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tyro major multi task combat wing
I'm not sure exactly when I got started, but it must have been
early teens.
My dad had done aeromodelling in the past.
I guess it was just a matter of time until I was old enough.
Almost everything seems to be radio controlled these days, but back then radio
gear was very expensive. Even buying an engine was a big deal.
I think probably the earliest thing I did was a Blue Peter
sheet balsa glider from the TV.
I had worked out the smallest bit of wood from which I could cut the parts and
asked for that when my dad took me to the model shop that was in Ford Street in
town, in those days.
Of course, it's not cut to order. You just have to buy standard size sheets.
For years I thought that balsa wood actually smelled like it did in that shop.
Eventually I realised that it was pipe tobacco or cigars, that the owner seemed
to smoke all the time.
There was another shop in Cross Cheaping - Harveys.
Later we did a few balsa and tissue rubber
powered things.
Typically Keilkraft kits of ww2 fighters like the Hurricane.
These never flew very well, being scale, and they always looked rather anaemic,
ending up as just doped tissue and balsa, rather than painted.
Still, a good introduction to construction techniques.
Similar to the rubber powered things, but powered by a small
rocket motor.
Some sort of relatively slow burning dark orange fuel cast into (expensive)
cylindrical pellets, lit by real sparkly fuse wire coiled against the pellets
behind a wire mesh and fed out through the exhaust hole.
Well, they would light sometimes.
A few seconds of intense white smoke thrust (nitrogen I think), leaving a
horrid dark green meringue in the motor.
Bit of a fire risk really.
The motor was held in with a spring clip, and was quite inclined to jump out on
heavy landings.
We lost our motor in the long grass, and never did find it again.
We found some plans in a US magazine for a free flight heli.
This used a cox 049 motor with standard prop fitted backwards facing the
ground, mounted on a ply plate fixed to a vertical piano wire shaft running in
a brass tube in the main body up to the rotor head.
The rotor head was 3 equally spaced piano wire shafts with free swivelling main
blades (balsa) with brass tubes near the front, with limit wires to control the
maximum positive and negative incidence.
Each blade had a small inclined tail which at speed would force the blade to
tilt up and provide lift.
However after the motor cut, the blades would tilt back into autorotation mode.
The main rotor was driven merely by the torque reaction from the motor prop.
The fuel tank filling holes had to be sealed together with a loop of tube, to
prevent centrifugal force spraying the fuel out.
This meant that the fuel tank was effectively sealed, so you could not expect a
full run.
Just a matter of starting the motor a few times, until it was running in the
required direction ie. backwards, wait for the rotor to spin up, and let go.
The main body would only rotate slowly as the only torque on it was the drag in
the main rotor bearing.
There was a vertical fin at the tail to slow this too.
There was a trip wire to flip the rotor blades at a fixed point relative to the
body, to force a bit of forward flight.
It flew reasonably well.
Not exactly your traditional aircraft.
Cut some segments from coloured tissue and join together with white glue to
form a rough sphere with a tube opening.
Reinforce the opening with some thin piano wire, and hang an aluminium cup
burner from that.
Splash a bit of meths in the burner, light it. Wait for the heat to take the
weight away, and let go.
Hope that the fuel runs out before it disappears over the horizon.
Or rather don't as these are a horrible fire risk, and just not
sensible.
The only thing you see these days, are the envelope on its own, with a separate
ground based burner.
You really need a virtually windless day too.
Eventually we got on to intrnal combustion engines.
I think the 1st we had was Enya 09.
This was a bit weird as other people had OS 10.
Not only was it slightly smaller capacity, but the exhaust port was on the
"wrong" side, so that fitted to a typical control line aircraft for anti
clockwise circuits, the exhaust was open upwards.
We made quite a few control line models, eventually drifting
towards combat with OS 20.
Several school friends including Jes and Richard were also into this.
We used to fly on the waste ground behind the church in Wyken Croft, and on the
football field by the side.
This is now the River Sowe nature reserve, and has been landscaped quite a bit.
I think it has been used as a landfill at some point in its history.
When I think it about it now, the safety implications of control line models of
about a pound or 2 in weight whizzing round at head height are quite worrying,
although we never had any problems.
We had lots of arguments (noise) with local people claiming to be on "nights"
whatever they were?
Of course we didn't use silencers. They would just be extra weight to carry,
with a reduction in power too.
Eventually dad financed the purchase of a 2 channel
MacGregor radio set which found its way into a plan built
Bravo powered glider model with a 10 sized motor.
I'm not sure whether we had an OS 10 by that time ?.
At this point we joined the Coventry club where we got some help learning to
fly.
The MacGregor radio used dry cells, which meant a new set every week/flying
session to be safe, but NiCads were quite scarce and expensive in those days.
Later we got a 3 channel (throttle control too!) SkyLeader set
and a kit built Tyro Major.
This had quite a long career including dropping parachutes and flying inverted,
before the wings eventually folded.
I even flew it at school on an open day, much to the (noise) annoyance of
people running other things.
I don't think I have any photos of it (although I think there's some cine film
somewhere.
Here's a picture of someone else's from the web.
Later an OS 25 and the radio gear went into
various models of my own design, the latest of which is now in my garage.
Here's a picture of it with OS25 fitted and the Skyleader Tx.
The Coventry club had access to a farmer's field at
Dunchurch.
We also flew at Warwick racecourse.