From his archives Jan Hyde provides us with this episode of "UteRC Events and Modelers from the Past."
Clicking on most images will open them full-sized and zoomable in a new window.
Ralph Moore, a long time club member, retired and extremely successful New York Life Insurance salesman was originally quite active and involved with free flight. Eventually his interest evolved to R/C.
Bob West hooked up with Ralph sometime in the 80s and became his tutor in our wireless control hobby. Bob and Ralph must have gotten along very well as Bob assisted with equipment, and care. Much later on as Ralph became older, he required more assistance to fly. Most everyone paid attention to Ralph's needs but notably AJ Carlson was his go to modeler for assistance. AJ kept Ralph in the air.
A consummate builder that must have been cultivated in his free flight days, his aircraft always looked beautifully done and flew nicely. With the advent of Almost Ready To Fly aircraft availability in the market, Ralph, the builder expressed his opinion of the look of these products with indignation by reluctantly purchasing an aircraft he might like then stripping the entire structure of it's plastic film and recovering it with his desired cloth covering. He had worked with silk and dope for years. Usually he preferred Worldtex or other cloth coverings such as Solartex. See an example of his "Perfect" in the following images.
One of Ralph's other loves is flowers. He enjoys planting flowers in his yard. I haven't had the pleasure of seeing his yard but I've heard that it is as fine as a redo look of his ARFs.
Thank you Jan for sharing the story.
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Here are photos from the March 9th UteRC Meeting.
Paul Jones shows a FrSky 4-Channel D4R-II 2.4 GHz ACCST receiver (with telemetry) that he likes.
The Mavic can be flown with its own controller, or a smart phone which can show the image seen by the camera aboard the drone. The Mavic is an extremely stable platform that can hover or maintain a flight pattern with independent control of the camera's view.
Tony Naef describes an optical tachometer that has an electronic shutter clibrated in RPM thru which one czn look at a helicopter rotor and adjust the shutter rate until the rotor appears stopped. At that point the shutter indicates the RPM. The device is essential for setting up a helicopter where an up-close direct-reading optical tachometer is dangerous, difficult, or impossible to use.
Tony describes the process of adjusting the throttle curve on the Tx to best manage the helicopter while in flight.
I hope you enjoyed these photos. -Ed