Hi Claudio:
Well, no; in those days all my ST 46 engines (and later the FSR 40s) were custom fit and tuned by Richie Tower.
I'm going to paste in here a portion of one of the chapters of my Genesis Saga book that covers to a degree the days in which the East Coast guys (and others) discovered and flew the ST 46. Even though I'm now a staunch believer in electric power, I look back very fondly on my days flying ST 46 powered models, and especially the days in which I used the OS Max 40 FSR engines.
Here goes...
For the next part of the Genesis story we need to retrace our steps a bit back to 1970. After Bill Werwage’s appearance at the 1969 Nats and his subsequent successes with the ST 46 powered USA-1 at the 1969 Team Trials and his Gold Medal winning performance at the 1970 World Championships, a number of stunt fliers began thinking about designing larger ships and utilizing the seemingly abundant, smooth and tamable power of the Super Tigre 46 engine.
Bob Lampione decided to go “big” for 1970 and designed and built a larger version of his 1969 Nats winning F-86 Sabre Jet. He opted to start his big model experiments around a foam Shark 45 wing, and he used a Fox .59 for power. His decision to use the Fox 59 instead of the ST 46 came about because of Larry Scarinzi’s success with the Fox 59 in his famous Blue Angel design. With that ship Larry placed third at the 1964 Nats in Dallas. Unfortunately the Fox just didn’t make the kind of power required to haul the somewhat heavy F-86 around properly. Add to that the fact that Bob was never able to achieve a proper “stunt run” with that engine and the result was less than desirable. It was good enough, however, to garner a fine 4th place finish at the 1970 Nats in Glenview, Illinois.
Bill Simons had decided to go big at about that same time, but he opted to use the ST 46 for power as Bill Werwage had. He really didn’t want to use any existing design technology and so he set off on his own to come up with a totally new ship using the “blank sheet of paper” approach.
The first decision that Bill had to make was what wing to use. Again he shunned any existing airfoils and came up with one of his own. I remember being in his shop and asking him how one designs an original airfoil. He literally put a piece of plywood on the floor and then put his foot down on the plywood and drew around the curve of the sole of his shoe! “There,” he said, “It’s a Florsheim Special!” Obviously he tweaked that curve more than just a bit before he was done designing, but that really was how he initially started the development of that airfoil set.
Bill designed a ship with twin rudders and appropriately named it Gemini. I cut the foam wing for that ship and it had more than 720 square inches of wing area. It was the biggest thing he’d ever built, and as it began to take shape in his diminutive bedroom workshop, I wasn’t too sure that he’d be able to get it out the door when it was finished. Okay, that’s an exaggeration… but not much of one!
In typical Bill Simons’ fashion, the finish on the Gemini was outstanding. Unfortunately, however, the projected finished weight was exceeded by quite a few ounces and the ship tilted the scales at 67 ounces! We were used to the 35 ships coming in at 39 to 45 ounces, so this was a shock. So much so that Bill decided to not even attempt flying the new ship. He just hung it on his workshop wall. And there it stayed for almost three years just gathering balsa dust and serving as an example of a good idea gone wrong.
I tried to get Bill to fly the Gemini, if only to see what it looked like in the air, but he was having none of it. It was a “Hangar Queen” to him and that was that. Bill could be stubborn.
Okay, now let’s fast forward to 1973. Just a couple of days before Bill was scheduled to leave for the Oshkosh Nats he was out practicing with his Gambit model. This ship was a slightly larger than normal 35-size design, but it was very light and it flew very well. It was powered by an OS Max 35S engine. Bill had been practicing hard with this ship and he was looking more than ready to make a serious assault on the Walker Trophy that year. That’s what we all thought right up to the point where, on one of the last practice flights before packing to leave, he neglected to walk backwards while performing a triangle loop in dead calm conditions. You guessed it; the model hit its own wake turbulence and knife-edged in towards Bill. He couldn’t gain line tension quickly enough to save the model and it smashed to bits against the asphalt.
Bill did not have another model to use as a backup… except the un-flown, heavy, balsa dust-covered Gemini. I reminded him about that model shortly after he picked up all the pieces of the Gambit.
Bill took the Gemini off the wall and cleaned off the three-year accumulation of dust and paint overspray. Under that mess was still a beautiful, brand-new stunt model. It was still heavy, however, and Bill didn’t hold out too much hope that it would fly well, if at all. He’s a trouper, however and proceeded to purchase and prepare a brand new set of .018 cables on which to fly the ship (neither he nor I had flown a model on such “thick” lines before).
Bill, Bill Eybers, and I went out to the field the next day to test fly the Gemini. Bill test ran the engine on the ground and then rolled out the .018 “chains.” He fired up the ST .46 and set the needle. We were all amazed at the “throat” of the sound made by this engine. He looked at me and smiled a bit, raised his eyebrows in a sort of “Here goes nothing” look, walked to the center of the circle and picked up the handle. He signaled for launch and I remember thinking as the big Gemini accelerated away that this was a bit like christening a new Navy ship and seeing it slide down the dry dock ways!
The Gemini settled into very stable-looking level flight at about a 5.5 second lap time. It looked slow on the long lines (at least they were longer than we were used to!). As I remember they were 65-foot long lines. So the actual length from the center of the plane to the center of the handle was in the 67-foot range.
The moment of truth had arrived and I was surprised to see Bill pull right up into a Reverse Wingover! I thought he might at least do a few loops or lazy eights before starting a pattern. What followed was an epiphany for all of us. The big ship flew awesomely well and Bill looked good with it immediately.
When he landed we all both broke out in unbridled laughter. He was obviously more than a little happy with the performance of the new/old ship and just could not believe that something so big and heavy could perform so well. (inside he just had to be kicking himself…)
Bill did a very few trim adjustments and flew the ship four or five more times and then declared it the best flying thing he’d ever owned. He offered me a flight on the ship, and even though it was the only plane he had that he could compete with the following week at the Nats, I took him up on it. I was told, however, to take it easy and not do the entire pattern with it. That seemed fair.
The Gemini felt great to me right away and had a sort of “slow motion” characteristic to it. The long lines and the powerful engine combined to yield an airplane that was amazingly easy to fly at 45 degrees. It was also extremely easy to scribe round and square shapes with that model. The vertical line tension was the best I’d ever felt up to that point from a stunt model. I knew that Bill had a serious weapon here, and I wanted one too!
For the record, Bill flew the Gemini to a fifth place finish at the 1973 Nats. That’s not bad for a brand new model with but a small handful of practice flights on it. The weather at Oshkosh that year was very windy and Bill’s big model went through it with obvious ease.
It was clear to everyone who competed in the event that the age of the larger CL Stunt model had indeed arrived. Yes, Lew McFarland had done well with his Shark 45 design throughout the 1960s, winning it all in 1961 and 1962. Bill Werwage also experimented early on with the larger ships and produced the Super Ares, which, like Lew’s Shark, was powered by a K&B 45. It flew well and he placed second at the Nats in 1963. And, Bob Gialdini won in 1965 at Willow Grove flying his magnificent and very large Lee/Veco .45 powered Eclipse (it was also the first CL Stunt model equipped with a muffler to win a Nats.) For whatever reason, however, Lew’s, Bill’s and Bob’s successes with the bigger models didn’t register with too many fliers as the way to go then. But, when Bill Werwage won the World Championships flying a big model, and then backed it up with another Gold Medal performance two years later, quite a few began to take notice.
Bill Simons was not to only one to switch to larger models by 1973, but his model seemed to have the right look and seemed like a reasonable formula to follow to get started in this direction.
It must be noted here that in 1973 there were four .46-size models in the Top Ten and six 35-size models. That was soon to change.
The above story tells of our first experiences with the ST 46. There's lots more to the ST 46 story on the East Coast, and virtually everyone who flew competitively in that region during the mid 1970s used them exclusively. Bill Simons' Scorpio, Jim Casale's Spectrum series, Gene Schaffer's Genesis 46, Statesman, and Hallmark models, and many others found good, solid, dependable power in the ST 46. And then came the OS 40 FSR...
Here's another excerpt from the Genesis Saga that explains how that engine came to be our favorite:
Construction on the new Genesis 46 Mk III was well underway in the early spring of 1978. The 1977 ship was performing great and everything seemed to be going well. I was content. That was not to last very long.
I had met Richie Tower several years before (December of 1973, I think…), and he used to spend his off days hanging around my shop building. He was looking in a drawer for something one day and found a box that contained an OS Max .40FSR RC engine. He asked me what it was for and I told him that it had been given to me as a gift by Frank McMillan. I had not known what to do with it and the thought to try it in a CL Stunt model never even crossed my mind. Richie asked me if he could borrow it. I said, “Sure,” not even wanting it back.
I forgot about that engine and the fact that Richie had it until he arrived at my shop one afternoon in the in the early summer of 1978 and said, Get a handle and get in my truck.” I thought to ask, “What for,” but thought better of it considering the look on Richie’s face and the tone of his voice. He meant business.
We drove the two miles to the Middlesex Modelers field and there he extracted a very familiar model from the back of the truck. It was Lou Dudka’s Genesis 46 Mk II that we had nicknamed, “Bowser.” Why Bowser? It was a dog! That plane weighed a ton - or at least 72 ounces! Most local stunt fliers had flown Bowser a time or two in the past and it was always amusing to see how much it mushed in the corners and how dead it looked at the end of the lines. No one could make that model look good in the pattern. It was normally fitted with a very tortured ST .46.
Richie set Bowser on the line and told me to run out the lines and put my handle on and get a setting. By this time I had noticed that Bowser was fitted with a rather large 2-blade prop. How big? Try 13 inches. (That was huge in those days!) There was another strange thing about the nose area on Bowser. The ST .46 had been replaced by that RC engine that Richie had “borrowed” almost four years earlier. Well, I just laughed.
There was no way that a miniscule RC .40 was going to swing that club of a prop, and even if it did, the best it could hope to do with Bowser attached was to taxi around the circle. Richie didn’t seem too amused that I was so amused and told me to, “Just shut up and fly it.”
Epiphany time in Middlesex is what followed. Richie fired up the engine up and set it at what seemed too high a RPM setting. I shook my head and waved my hand for a launch. Bowser shot out from Richie’s launch and settled into a very steady level flight at about a 5.6 second lap. The line tension was staggering. I at first attributed this to the weight of this canine aerobat, but soon sensed that the real reason for the tension was power.
I pulled up into a wingover expecting the plane to lag as it always had before. Imagine my surprise when the ship pulled very steadily over the top. It felt as if it had shed 20-plus ounces! I went on to fly a pattern that was nearly the equal of what I was flying with my 56-ounce front-line ship! I was totally amazed and all Richie could do was smile as I landed and walked out to the model.
Richie Tower was known on the East Coast Hot Rod circuit as one of the most savvy engine builders in the area. He built not only drag car engines but also winning circle-track engines for a number of successful racers. The tuning of the engines for the different types of racing is very specific and Richie knew the intricacies of each type and how to extract maximum performance. When he got into modeling and started to use 2-cycle engines he cracked the books and learned what made them work and how to get more performance and reliability from them.
The OS Max .40FSR had Schneurle porting and most of us CL types thought that engines with that construction would not be able to run with a traditional 2-4 break. We just assumed that they were all highly timed for fast run applications. Richie actually did the math…
He really didn’t modify the timing or anything else at that point on the FSR, but he did figure out that the engine worked at a higher RPM range than we were used to and also had to be significantly loaded with prop to work well in our application. He tried that and it worked. To be fair, the FSR did have a tendency to run faster at the tops of outside maneuvers than our traditional stunt engines, but the big prop masked this tendency enough to make the engine more than usable. It was a very small price to pay for the amount of power that it produced.
I was sold, but wanted to try the same thing with an HP 40 that I’d acquired. To be fair, Bill Werwage was the first flier that I knew of who had successfully tried a Schneurle ported .40 engine in CL Stunt. He had fitted his Peroquet design with an HP .40 in 1976 and used it to capture a Silver Medal at the 1976 World Championships. Billy is well known for his prowess with engines, and we all just thought that he had modified the timing to allow that engine to work for stunt. After seeing and feeling the OS .40FSR work so well I was inclined to put a venturi into the HP .40 that I owned and stick it in the nose of my 1977 Genesis 46Mk III.
I installed the HP, put on a wooden 3-blade 11 x 5 prop and went to the field. The HP pulled my Genesis just as well as the FSR had pulled Bowser, only the effect was better since my ship was lighter. I did have to run it at a higher RPM range, just like the FSR, and it had a great 2-4 break at that RPM, just like the FSR. I decided to use this engine at the World Championships after but a handful of runs on it.
I had finished the new Genesis and had installed the HP .40. It was by far the best ship I had owned to date. It was extremely easy to fly and it turned equally and locked after a corner like nothing I’d ever owned or flown. I was a happy guy!
I had by then acquired the use of the Rutgers University Sports Arena parking lot as a practice facility, When the security guards at Rutgers discovered what I was doing there and what I was preparing for, they bent over backwards to make things easy for me. Heck, they even went out and got lunch for me sometimes! I think they really enjoyed watching me fly.
I realized that if I was going to use the HP in competition, I would need a few back up engines, so I contacted Jerry Nelson, owner of Midwest Model Supply. Jerry’s company was the importer and distributor of the HP line of engines in those days. I told him what I wanted and what I was planning to use the engines for, and he offered up a sponsorship! He sent me several engines and a bunch of spare parts, including an inordinate number of piston rings. I thought that was a bit strange, but very soon found out why.
When I started practicing seriously I began having problems with the HP. It would run well for a few flights and then it would start to lose power. It sounded fine, but it just stopped pulling the airplane with any authority. I changed the ring in the engine and the power instantly came back. I thought I had the problem solved. Not to be… The new ring lasted only a handful more flights and the problem repeated itself. It was a cycle that continued for several days.
Each day I would fly several flights and then take the engine out and change the ring. That would restore the power for a few more flights and then I had to repeat the ring change process. It was getting old and time was getting short, but I was stubborn. Make that, I was stupid! I just refused to give up on the HP.
Later on – after my return from the World Championships – we took a long, hard look at the HP .40 engine to try and figure out why they were eating rings. I had been sure that the rings were simply losing their temper. (There had been a rash of ST .46 rings that had experienced the same problem years earlier.) What we found out was – and the people at Midwest Model Supply confirmed after some pressing - was that the liners had been manufactured with a process that left a microscopic burr at the ports on the inside of the liner. The lip was shearing the rings with each revolution and it didn’t take too long for that process to wear away enough of the ring to affect the seal. Go figure.
To the rescue came Richie Tower once again. He showed up at my shop just two days before I was scheduled to leave for England. He had the FSR from Bowser in his hand and he told me to get my plane off the wall and put it upside down on the bench. He wasn’t even asking me if he could swap out the HP for the FSR, he just did it!
Not only did the FSR run perfectly in the new Genesis, it flew it even better and with more authority than did the HP at its best. I thanked Richie profusely, but then realized that I didn’t have a back up engine. A quick call to Les McDonald at Orange Blossom Hobbies had a brand new one on its way to me via express mail. It arrived just in time.
With only two or three flights on the FSR in the nose of my new Genesis, I packed to leave for the World Championships. I was mentally and physically exhausted from the recent week’s ordeals, but I figured I could rest up during the flight to England.
You might be asking yourself at this point, “Why didn’t he just put the ST .46 back in the ship?” Well, that’s a good question and the answer is that the Schneurle 40 motors just had way more usable power than the ST .46, and I had become addicted to it. I just didn’t feel that I would have been competitive with the ST .46 if the conditions turned ugly. As it turned out, I was right! In my opinion the ST .46 was the perfect engine for a somewhat smaller ship, like Gene’s Hallmark or Bill Werwage’s Juno. I just think that we started our ST .46 experiments with an airframe that was too big. Yeah, they worked okay in perfect conditions, but when the wind came up big they were lacking in performance. Again, that’s my opinion.
Inspiration and innovation, had turned to perspiration and exasperation for me at the eleventh hour of this quest, and only a miracle could have saved the day. Richie Tower was that miracle.
I know the above was a bit lengthy, but it does serve to illustrate our thinking in the 1970s on the East Coast about stunt ship size and power.
Later - Bob Hunt
Topic: WHAT MODEL WOULD YOU CHOOSE FOR A ST.46? (Read 12268 times)