I have been doing a bit of Ebaying lately and have picked up quite a few vintage OS, Enya, Merco, MVVS, Fox, and Taipan motors out of interest to see how far technology has progressed. It was interesting to run them one after the other on my test stand yesterday. I used 0% nitro on all. I used the same prop on each capacity division (15,19,29,35,40) to try to compare power between each brand. At the end of this not very scientific experiment I came to one conclusion. Hats off to all you guys that were successfully flying patterns in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Most of these motors, despite being mainly almost new in operational terms, were to put it mildly, "crap". The worst were the Mercos, talk about gutless! The most impressive was the MVVS, Taipan and Fox (in that order). The MVVS (albeit a more recent design) and Taipans were particularly well built and powerful for their size. Obviously a bench run is not going to give much impression of how they handle a stunt run but it did certainly show which motors would provide enough power while in a rich two stroke to actually pull a model around the pattern. One of the most noticeable improvements that have been made on modern motors were the NVA assemblies. Again the Mercos were awful and the Fox was ordinary at best. It must have been very difficult to get consistency out of some of these motors with such poor NVAs. About the only positive thing that I did note was that the weight of the motors hasn't changed a great deal over the years. I now have a greater respect for our "senior" flyers and an increased appreciation of my current Stalker and Enya motors. The next question is why did it take so long to get right? We finally have great stunt internal combustion motors (only took about 50 years!) but will probably all be flying electric within 10 years due to noise restrictions (if control line survives that long).
Topic: Hats Off To F2B Pioneers (Read 1667 times)