Brett noted that 4 cycles came around twice. I think this is a pretty good example of the "Stunt Lemming" syndrome that affects many participants in the PA community. It is sort of a combination of leadership or notoriety envy and confirmation bias.
There is no question that "fads" happen, but in this case, the first serious 4-stroke experiments were looking for a replacement for the ST46, which had been discontinued. The ST60 was the obvious alternative, but it had also been discontinued, and some of the ST60 promoters were so off-putting that quite a few people wanted to avoid that entire scene, and the airplanes that seemed ideal for it were also huge and took a lot of muscle to fly. 4-strokes couldn't "run away" like the schneurle wars engines, because of the extremely limited high-RPM breathing. So it was a good alternative, if you could fix the issues, which seem in retrospect to all be related to fuel flow restrictions and air leaks in the stock RC carbs.
This was all in the 1985-86 time frame, but a much better alternative came along in a few years, so it dropped again until the promoters came back with 4-strokes in the early 2000s. That was a fad for sure, but it definitely works to some degree, in the right hands, and is a train wreck in the wrong hands (just like everything else).
There's nothing wrong with watching what other people are doing and trying to evaluate it for yourself - in fact, you really *should* pay attention to people who really know what they are doing, otherwise you never learn anything. But simply copying people without knowing why or what problem they are solving usually just winds up with "followers".
To take advantages of the differences between systems, you have to be able to assess the pros and cons, which are sometimes pretty subtle. So there are a lot of bandwagon-jumpers who adopt a particular engine as "their thing" and stop being objective. If they can get it to run pretty well, it's the best thing they ever had, so they are very enthusiastic about it. That something else that also was set up optimally might be better, well, you have to have had that experience to have a basis for comparison. There were a few days where I thought the ST46 was the greatest thing possible in stunt, what else would you ever need? Because I didn't know any better.
That evaluation disappeared in about 1/4 lap with a 40VF.
Unfortunately many, many people have very basic issues with just running engines at all, and the simplest basic setups, despite the fact that a lot it the necessary details were known more than half-a-century ago. You see thread after thread like this in the Engine Setup forum - basically, that is all it is. Not that anyone should feel bad about it, but if you can't (for example) figure out what venturi to use just to get it started and running reliably, and jump around by factors of 2 or more at random, you have no hope of evaluating the merits of a perfectly-configured ST46 VS a perfectly-configured Saito 56. Again, this is not something to be ashamed of, but this is a function of the *huge* range of skills we deal with here and in stunt in general - from the most novice sport fliers to world champions.
Brett
Topic: 4-stroke Era (Read 2290 times)