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Thread: What's on your Workbench back in 1946?

  1. #1

    Default What's on your Workbench back in 1946?

    Yes you read right, 1946. Imagine you are a teenager in the glory days of aviation, you are airplane crazy, buy your dad had had a gruesome experience with airplanes in WWI. As an ambulance corpsman he had seen a lifetime of aviation deaths, planes were not safe. But how do you deal with such wondrous forbidden fruit? You make the old abandoned farm pump house into your fantasy workshop. It was there that my father honed his Clipper skills. After he thrilled his parents and chose the Navy instead of the Air Force, it was off to see the world. The fact he ended up a Naval Aviator is another story. This one is about a farm pump house filled with model airplanes. His mom discovered it chasing a chicken that did not want to be dinner, you guessed it into the pump house. My dad was in boot camp, far away, so his mom made all the boys at the Grange very happy with her son's evil toys. But she didn't find the P-38!

    It was dad's delight. It hung reverently in his den and later in the shop. After decades of moves and drops and hangar crashes, I found the carcass in an old battered box.

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    It called to me yesterday.

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    Wonderful work for a teen, throttles and butterfly yoke, instruments, even a cool gun site. Wonderful wounds and gashes, missing bits, no engines-wait I remember a lot of bits in his boxes,. . .

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    Wing, rudder, canopy, wheels, engines, vintage props . . . far too much damage to repair, I determined to restore it with its war scars

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    Left dad's wire right where he put it decades ago

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    Ready for a few more decades of airplane dreamers

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    Que the Twilight Zone music . . .
    Last edited by clipper1801; 05-07-2020 at 08:44.

  2. #2

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    Those are glow plugs on the engines!!!!!!!.......That thing was a flier????

    It reminds me of some of gas powered planes we used to fly as kids. Stand in a parking lot and spin in a circle with a hand control making it dive and climb. Had a two winger stunt plane and a big Stuka with a bomb you could drop. Think I had it back in the early 70's.

    Pic of one like it I found.
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    Last edited by Shadowcat; 05-06-2020 at 22:53.

  3. #3

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    In January 1946, this is what my father was working on.

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  4. #4

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    Quote Originally Posted by Shadowcat View Post
    Those are glow plugs on the engines!!!!!!!.......That thing was a flier????

    It reminds me of some of gas powered planes we used to fly as kids. Stand in a parking lot and spin in a circle with a hand control making it dive and climb.
    I would spin and get dizzy and the plane would crash. It would take forever for my father to get the engine started. I believe we had a P-40. I know it had a shark-mouth.
    So how many books are in your personal library?

  5. #5

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    I remember spending the summer away from the city, Newark NJ, and staying with my aunt in PA. A friend dad had a bunch of those string guided planes in the basement. Next to their house was a big lot that he would "fly" them in for us to watch. Don't remember what type of planes they were but that was something different for a kid. Great memories from back in the 50's.

  6. #6

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    Quote Originally Posted by Shadowcat View Post
    Had a two winger stunt plane and a big Stuka with a bomb you could drop. Think I had it back in the early 70's.

    Pic of one like it I found.
    I used to dream of owning one of those when I was 10 or 11.

    Every trip to the model shop I would admire it, hanging from the ceiling.
    There were other planes as well, of course, but this was the one for me.

  7. #7

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    A friend of mine that lived across the street had one of those string flown Stukas. I thought it odd it was made of plastic. When he finally crashed it, it shattered into pieces. He never tried to fix it. Thad sealed the deal for me, no plastic flying planes. I built a couple of Guillows (sp?) balsa and tissue planes, a P-40 and a Fokker DVII, but didn't have the money to buy the engines and remote controls. ..... someday.

  8. #8

  9. #9

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    Quote Originally Posted by Teaticket View Post
    A friend of mine that lived across the street had one of those string flown Stukas. I thought it odd it was made of plastic. When he finally crashed it, it shattered into pieces.
    I realized that a plastic plane wouldn't last long, especially after seeing my older brother's experiences with his simpler balsa and doped tissue machines.
    He had an all wood Camel (or SPAD) that I don't think he ever sent airborne because he didn't want to deal with the inevitable crash.


    Looked cool though.

  10. #10

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    Quote Originally Posted by clipper1801 View Post
    WOW Zoe that is super cool!
    Totally agree. Zoe, did it ever fly?

  11. #11

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    Wow, how interesting! Thanks for sharing Dave.

  12. #12

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    haha what a wonderful find! wish i had some old family projects. ive got a few old projects of my own to get to "one of these days"! ive got a number of 1/48 b-17s in various stages of finishing or repairing (due to encounters with a sleepy cat lol). maybe someday when i have the space to display them

  13. #13

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    That's awesome, Dave, well done

  14. #14

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    Quote Originally Posted by Shadowcat View Post
    Those are glow plugs on the engines!!!!!!!.......That thing was a flier????

    It reminds me of some of gas powered planes we used to fly as kids. Stand in a parking lot and spin in a circle with a hand control making it dive and climb. Had a two winger stunt plane and a big Stuka with a bomb you could drop. Think I had it back in the early 70's.

    Pic of one like it I found.
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    lol I had one exactly like this. When we fired it up I got giddy at the noise. My dad handled its inaugural flight which consisted of exactly one revolution before a dramatic vertical stall ending in an immediate dive, augured in. RIP Stuka.

  15. #15

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    Quote Originally Posted by Teaticket View Post
    Totally agree. Zoe, did it ever fly?
    Sort of. The project was cancelled under controversial circumstances in February 1946, and all the data and scientific instruments, analogue computers etc used in development shipped off to the US.

    A 30% sized model fitted with a rocket motor was constructed a few years later.

    In October, 1948, a second rocket powered model was launched. This was successful and achieved a speed of Mach 1.5.

    One interesting titbit of information, purportedly from a member of the development team, was that at the end of the flight, it was planned that the aircraft would be given instructions that would send it into an 'impossible manoeuvre', a 15G turn, thus destroying the aircraft and letting the pieces fall back into the sea. However, what actually happened was that on the successful completion of the test, the 'self-destruct' command was transmitted, but, instead of the aircraft being destroyed by the manoeuvre, it was suddenly discovered that the airframe was so well designed that it survived what was thought to be impossible, and it was last observed on radar heading serenely out over the Atlantic Ocean.
    https://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A882272

    Not so much well designed as designed and constructed by a bunch of eccentric geeks who were truly paranoid about the aerodynamic loads during transonic flight. So it was grossly over engineered, each wing and fuselage cell having a different fundamental frequency so there was no destructive vibration. I can confirm from multiple primary sources - including my father - that this story is essentially correct.

    He was also decidedly upset that his personal circular slide rule, which he had had constructed from parts of one of the many crashed aircraft on the field, was taken from him and put in one of the tea chests of documents headed for the US. Woodley had a really long runway with a gravel pit at the end, so damaged aircraft with dodgy landing gear were often diverted there. The first production Biro ballpoint pens were made with ball bearings from crashed Spitfires by Miles.

    As a result, a successful test flight did not take place until quite late in the trials, on 9 October 1948. The official report records that a speed of 'about Mach 1.4' (918 mph) was achieved.

    Unfortunately the mechanism to cause the model to dive into the sea did not work correctly and it continued to fly, transmitting data ‘for about eight minutes ’ when ‘signals…ceased abruptly’. By this time the model would have been more than 60 miles from its launch point. This rather put paid to any hope of salvaging the successful model and its final resting place was never determined.
    https://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/blog/wh...ic-model-land/

    Film showing the launch and first few seconds of flight towards the end of this video.



    While Eric Brown was slated to fly it, the Mandarins at the Air Ministry were looking favourably at the requests of a number of German POWs with Me263 and Me163 experience to do the initial subsonic testing. They were begging for the chance, and some in the Air Ministry considered it suicidally dangerous, they were POWs so expendable.

    The high speed all moving tail had been independently discovered in the US, just not by Bell Aircraft. It was the wind tunnel data from the UK that presumably caused its adoption. A Spitfire with an all moving tail had been dived at 580mph and the data from this test had proven invaluable.

    There is some doubt that the Powerjets engine had enough thrust. Dry, it could take the aircraft to maybe 550mph. Reheat might not have been enough to take it beyond 750mph. The airframe could take 1000mph and a lot more, but this was not known at the time.

    Wiki is pretty good on the subject. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_M.52

  16. #16

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    Neat, a control line plane! My dad flew them, and then we flew them as kids. Tilting the control handle forward and back put tension on the appropriate line and raised/lowered the elevator.

    Check out modern control line combat!

    https://youtu.be/7MSUTzMFHeU

  17. #17

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    Quote Originally Posted by driph View Post
    Neat, a control line plane! My dad flew them, and then we flew them as kids. Tilting the control handle forward and back put tension on the appropriate line and raised/lowered the elevator.

    Check out modern control line combat!

    https://youtu.be/7MSUTzMFHeU
    Oh my! That combat is insane!

  18. #18

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    Quote Originally Posted by Teaticket View Post
    Oh my! That combat is insane!
    Yes! But what is the aim?
    a) tangle your opponent's wire and force him down?
    b) physically bash him out of the sky?
    c) chop/tear off his ribbon tail?
    d) wear out your opponent (physically!) until he can't go on?

    e) all of the above?
    I laugh in the face of danger - then I hide until it goes away!

  19. #19

    Default

    Each model carries a sting and a streamer. On the extreme end is a small index card, you get points for just cutting the card! But it is very difficult to do just that! I spent my summers flying 1/2A combat in the '70s! Dizzy crazy fun indeed! It is also fun to share the circle with another pilot without getting tangled up. I had a close friend who flew stunt contests with me, we would put on simultaneous maneuvers like loops and lazy eights. Also quite fun! Unlike R/C models with control line models you could actually feel the airplanes in flight, very very cool!

    Here's some of my other hobby:

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    Last edited by clipper1801; 05-12-2020 at 13:42.

  20. #20

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    Quote Originally Posted by clipper1801 View Post
    Each model carries a sting and a streamer. On the extreme end is a small index card, you get points for just cutting the card! But it is very difficult to do just that! I spent my summers flying 1/2A combat in the '70s! Dizzy crazy fun indeed! It is also fun to share the circle with another pilot without getting tangled up. I had a close friend who flew stunt contests with me, we would put on simultaneous maneuvers like loops and lazy eights. Also quite fun! Unlike R/C models with control line models you could actually feel the airplanes in flight, very very cool!
    So kind of like flag football with planes!
    Karl
    It is impossible for a man to begin to learn what he thinks he knows. -- Epictetus

  21. #21

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jager View Post
    So kind of like flag football with planes!
    Karl
    Yeah, exactly!


    The pilot and his plane paint their undulating patterns on the electric blue canvas of the sky...

    https://youtu.be/vJ0OChpLtbg



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