Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward

A friend gave me a model airplane he crashed. It is called an "ARF" which stands for Almost Ready to Fly. It is called a Giant Big Stick and retails from Tower Hobbies for about $250. The model does not come with the motor, speed controller, receiver, servos or batteries. Adding all that in brings the grand total to easily over $500. As a consequence you can imagine how my friend felt when he flew it through a tree and it disintegrated. So he salvaged all the extra stuff and gave me the splinters. Actually it was more than splinters. One of the wing halves was intact as was the tail section. The other wing half was pretty badly damaged and huge chunks were missing. Still it was repairable and by doing a little each day I will have it completed in a couple of weeks.

The hobby of flying RC model airplanes is a demanding one and for a free spirit like myself frustrating at times. For example I forgot that a 1.5 volt batter is used to charge the glow plug when starting the engine. By mistake I used a 12 volt battery and fried the glow plugs not realizing what I was doing. All I knew was the engine wouldn't start and I kept changing the plugs and burning them up one after another. I know, I know, it was stupid of me but its not the first time I've been gripped by a brain fart and couldn't figure out why things were falling apart. In addition to the glow plug issue I was encountering difficulties getting my charger to work. I entered all the parameters and it just sat there refusing to charge. Finally I took it back to where I bought it and the hobby guy showed me I had to depress and hold down the activation button for four seconds to make it start chugging.

Then I asked him why my glow charger wouldn't work. He explained that it was charged but to show the state of charge it had to have a glow plug to ground to. That was when I realized that I had been burning out the circuits on my plugs and the device was not grounding. So it goes as I struggle with mastering my RC Airplane Hobby. One step forward, two steps backward.