Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Getting past a common mindset

Now that i've written a Stage Play and Novel, I'm thinking about writing a "How to Book."

I like to work on Radio Controlled (RC) model aircraft and in the club I belong to members bring me their crashed planes. One member in particular has brought me four crashed, Giant Big Sticks. Some are not damaged that severely and could have been repaired.

This member, call him Joe, has the belief, shared by others, that once a model is crashed it is never the same again. I suppose it is similar to the state of mind that surrounds fidelity in marriage. Once they label it in their mind a "Damaged Good" they want to get rid of it and go buy a new one.

Anyway I am the beneficiary of this form of convoluted thinking and I am given so many of these models that my garage is full of them. For the sake of objectivity, my belief is, that a damaged model can be restored to "Good as New" status if the repair is light and straight. So that is what I do. I fix them straight and weight the same as when they came out of the box.

Another way I get my airplanes is when the builder dies, becomes ill or simply loses interest. I recently bought a Super Giant Bigs stick at a swap meet, complete with engine and paint for $300 that cost new $1300. I know this sounds like my wife coming out of Koles and bragging how much money she saved on her shopping. I suppose these are opposite ends of the same thing one being a "Girl" and the other being a "Boy" thing.

The way I really got into this was, several years ago, I bought a Quarter Scale gull winged model (100 inches) of a PLZ 1. I flew it and crashed severely. Rather than consigning it to the outdoor wood stove, I made it whole again. I really liked the way the original builder made the wing and these days when I do an overhaul the wing gets "Gulled." If it works for a bird, my thinking goes, it should work on a model airplane. "'nest pas?" (A french term I've forgotten how to spell. It's supposed to mean "Is that not so?"

Sometimes when a repairable plane is crashed the fuselage is destroyed and sometimes the wing. Usually one or the other can be fixed and what I like to do is wonder what wing X would look like on fuselage Y. If you walked into my messy workshop you would see the walls filled with wings and fuselages.

I envision my book as showing the process I go through to complete the rehabilitation.