An Old Tip From Jack Sheeks

[Dick Pacini]

I first met Jack Sheeks in the mid '60s.  I became a bit of a pest, calling him and visiting him at home, marveling at the way he could crank out stunters like a production line. Jack was always conscious of weight of his finished planes and he used to hand pick all his wood at the LHS.

The subject of kits came up one day.  He told me to take my scale with me to the hobby shop.  Then, find the model I was interested in and weigh all the kits they had, and buy the lightest one.  I discovered the difference in weight was sometimes substantial.  Being able to cut 3 ounces at point of purchase is painless.

This came to mind after following the thread about a balsa supplier and their policies.

[Air Ministry .]

I think Jacks planes are noteable for their lack of supuflous components and purity (simplicity ?) of line,
which gets them in the correct wing loading ballpark .Despite some people whingeing about lack of complexity in some drawings.

If you rip into them , most of the construction is self evedent , unless your prone to worrying and like to see 10 paces ahead .

C/L stunt , F.M. Mar 96 . "I was begining to see how they built their models without plans ,They just laid out the I beam centreline,Tail & Nose moments on the sheet Balsa sides,
Then drew the Airfoiul on the side to locate the wing leading and trailing edges,

A rough pencil sketch of the basic dimensions and shapes would suffice for the rest of the plane ".

Try this sometime when youre in a creative dispoition . You might even enjoy it .

[Dennis Adamisin]

Dick - good tip!

Last year we hile at the Fly-In my brother and I went to the Brodak Hobby Shop.  He was looking for a kit, but we did not have a scale, so we "weighed the kits literally by the "armstrong" method.  There were 6-7 kits on the shelf, all in shrink wrap.  I handed my brother two of them and asked which felt lighter.  He picekd one, I set aside the "heavy" and replaced it.  Bout 3-4 down in the stack he got one that seemed the lightest.

When he got it home and opened it up he affirmed that it truly did have some very nice wood in it!

[Richard Grogan]

Sounds like a reasonable tip! However, our LHS only carries one each of a very small CL collection, so you gotta go with what they have! (or scratch build!)