Mud Dabber Flys 3 Days Before Deadline!!!!

Ken Cook wrote:           Kim, is that bird oil soaked? I have to wonder because I can see that baby has some mileage on it.

Yep...it's packing its fair share of old castor.  I was able to replace its nose (the third time) by running some hard balsa sheet back to some relatively clean balsa back to the fuse's front bulkhead.  Everything seems pretty tight...thanks to C.A.!

The old dog has seen some rough times down through the decades!

Yeah,
Mud Dabber's O.S. is a .35.  I'd been calling it an "FP", all these years, but apparently, it's an older "S" model.

I was introduced to the O.S. brand in the mid-1970's by control line flying bud Kevin.  He was the first of our bunch to fly proportional R/C, and taught me to fly with his Kadet Mk1.  At the time, none of us had much experince with throttled engines...mostly throttle-band .049's and a couple McCoys.

Originally, he had a Fox .25 or some such on his plane, but could not get a dependable idle from it.  The engine was new out of the box, we had new fuel, and a good tank installation, did a long long break-in, everything by-the-book, but the Fox would just not run at lower rpm's.  He still flew it quite a bit, using the throttle to shut it down for dead stick landings.

He got the O.S. .35 bolted to his Kadet, and we both just stared at it on its first run.  The thing idled like an electric motor, right out of the box.  This literally opened up a new world for us, with super slow, main gear only touch & goes, and "propeller hanging" slow flight around the field.

We were somewhat the odd balls of the time, as everyone around us seemed obsessed with pushing Mach 2 behind some super tuned pipe monster, and here we were, "The Driving Miss Daisy" version of R/C.

This flying is what brought me to build Mud Dabber a few years later with, of course, the venerable O.S. hauling the model into the air.

As a side-note:

While still flying with the Fox, we decided it would be a great idea to fly his Kadet from our beloved Olmsted ball field to Uncle Wayne's house, 15 miles away...with a couple fueling stops at places we'd picked out.



I'd suggested taking off down the first base line, and spiraling up and out of the park, avoiding the power lines between the light poles.  But Kevin insisted that the mighty Fox had the ponies to just haul straight out from home plate, across the pitcher's mound, with a climb out over the wires.  It was his plane, and he DID have a lot more flying time than me, so...

As Maxwell Smart would say, "Missed it by THAT much!"

The climb rate wasn't as expected, and at the last instant, Kevin cranked the Kadet into a right turn to avoid the wires, but instead, hit them with its left wing.  The wires notched into the wing, bringing it to an abrupt halt, snapping the fuse loose, with the still-at-full-power Fox pile driving it into the ground.



This was the first (and only) instance where we had a plane try to catch fire, with a puff of smoke coming from the shattered/shorted nicad case trying to light up the debris field.  A bit of stomping and kicking eliminated that threat. The nose and tail actually looked pretty good, with everything in between turned to confetti.





We got the wing down using some borrowed tennis balls, and it was mostly undamaged...save for the prominent chunk missing from its left leading edge.

Kevin scratched out a new fuselage from the full-size plans included with the Kadet, and added the new O.S. engine.

This new fuselage was also destroyed in an ill-thought-out recovery from a steep power dive that popped the rubberbands from its wings.  

It again had a new fuselage built for it, but this time, Kevin scratched out a "Bananza" -ish design of his own, with huge ruddervators, and strip-ailerons added to the wing.  Once he got the crazy-sensitive throws adjusted, we flew together many times with my Shoestring, both packing O.S. .35's.





Sorry for the novel...I made a big pot of coffee this morning...

andrew wrote:Great video -- I was holding my breath during your takeoff and adding a little body English to help it up!!

Thanks Andrew!!! It NEEDED a little help!!!!!