Gee Ted, you are making me blush, and that's pretty hard to do!
As always you give me way too much credit. Yeah, I like to try new things, but rarely are they planned out to any degree. I'm just sort of a train wreck that keeps wrecking in a positive direction (well, most of the time). There have been a few things I've developed about which I'm proud. First on that list is the Lost-Foam system of building, followed closely by the development of improvements in foam wing technology. Beyond those two things most of my successes in innovation have been of the "blind squirrel finding an acorn" variety. And, hey, that's not a bad thing - if it works!
To get back a bit to this thread, we all revere the models of our youth in different ways. I grew up (well, I got older at least...) around Larry Scarinzi and Red Reinhardt, and they were genuinely innovative people. They were much larger than life to a young enthusiast, and it was their antics and their models that formed my path in modeling - along with the support and never-ending love of my father. Watching Larry fly his Grey Ghost through the pattern at about 80 MPH with a howling Johnson 35 in the nose was sensory overload for me, and for all the youngsters who were members of the famed Union Model Airplane Club back in the 1950s. Larry was always on a search for more power, and I guess that's why I liked stuffing high performance engines in my Classic models; I think I was subliminally trying to emulate Larry's approach.
Red was also a performance guy, but he was a more introspective person. He was a gifted machine designer and he worked for and with my father for more than 30 years. I spent a lot of time in dad's machine shop working with, and learning from Red how to work metal properly. I can tell you for certain that even though Red liked the hot glow motors of the era he would have jumped at the chance to use the more modern engines had they been available back then. And he would have just loved electric power, too. Red had no allegiance to an era, to any set paradigms, or any popular thinking. So I guess it was Red's influence that made me want to try anything new in hopes of finding more performance. And, striking off in some wild and seemingly non-traditional directions has on occasion put me at odds with the status quo of the event. Fortunately, many of the weird things I've done, or have been involved in have become staples of the event over time. Cases in point: Cored foam wings, tuned pipes, and being an early advocate of electric power (have to bow to Mike Palko and Walt Brownell as the actual pioneers of that power mode for our event...).
As I wrote in an earlier post on this thread, it is the aesthetic aspects of the old Classic models that turns me on. And to be able to fit them with more power to see just how well they can fly/could have flown is to me a very respectful thing. Don't you think the designers of those models would have loved to see them performing up to their full potential? If not then we certainly view this question differently. I'll not apologize for my views, nor will I disrespect anyone else's views on the subject; we all see things from a different perspective.
Bob Hunt
Topic: How Did We Fly These Things? (Read 10522 times)
