Date posted: July 9, 2011
– Download I’m a Nancy Boy, and I’d like to give you an update. as PDF –
What’s going on?
It sure has been a while since I’ve been on an updating streak. I spent this last week spending all of my waking hours outside of work and club meetings (I’m the Omahawks secretary now, who knew!) not only swapping platforms (bye, textpattern), updating the website layout, moving hosts, moving email accounts, and a few other housekeeping tidbits.
Why? I needed something better than texpattern, that allows me to add content the way I want to with as little side editing as possible. That comes down to tagging, categorizing, adding articles to series, and all sort of taxonomy and content related tasks that go well above and beyond the simple ‘type the post title and a paragraph’ tasks. With the pain in the arse of updating eliminated as much as possible, I’m actually looking forward to adding some new content to the site, instead of having a small amount of side dread with so many ‘busy-work’ tasks I no longer have to worry about.
With that in mind, I’m thinking about redoing the RC Power series first few episodes, then following along with the rest. This leads up to a new series I’m thinking of calling ‘Go big or go home – Electrifying a gas or nitro plane’. I’ve done two electric conversions to standard .40 Tower Trainer and a .46 Phoenix Model Sea Bee setups. Both were quite different in terms of the motor mounting, and choosing the right components. They fly well and I’m glad they worked out so nicely, I look forward to working on a series with these conversions. They’re also based on a club presentation I made on topic of electric flight, as my club has a lot of guys that fly nitro and gasoline that are looking for more electric action.
I am perpetually un-soloed.
It seems I’ve at least two long running jokes about me in the circle of my RC club members. The first is in regards to soloing. At a club with a training program, a pilot is considered soloed after they’ve completed a set of maneuvers without training boxes under the watchful gaze of an instructor. Of course, our club typically performs these training programs with .40 size standard nitro trainers. I never went through the training course at the club, as I was only flying my little park flyer electric craft, things I’d build from plans online, or the combat flyer. Fast forward a year and I’m fairly comfortable with electrics, and a few instructors thought I should just be marked off soloed and be done with it.
The soloing of a pilot entails the pilot wearing a cheesy disposable tie to a club meeting, where the president hands them their soloing certificate and cuts the tie in half. I told the instructors not to mark me as soloed, even with my foamy flying I’ve done over the year, handling bigger planes and landing on runways was still new to me. So when I started my electric conversions of bigger craft, I had a club member or two with me, but still taught myself without the buddy box. So then I was considered even ‘more soloed’ than before. However, I refused to accept it, and enough time passed to where I’m not sure I would learn much from buddy boxing and training by the next training season. Our training coordinator lightly threatened that I should just bring the tie to a meeting and join the ranks of the soloed anyhow, to which I replied, ‘The day you solo me is the day I resign as Secretary’. So I’ve deemed myself ‘perpetually un-soloed’. We joked about my bringing a tie cut in half to a club meeting, taping it back together, and getting the aforementioned ‘Perpetually Un-Soloed’ certificate.
Nancy Boy? Really?
Another running joke at the field relates to how much I’m an electric only kind of guy (I flew one liquid fueled plane for about 3 minutes once, that counts, right?). One of our club members, Ed, likes to joke how electrics are for girls… even though he has a few electrics himself. All in good fun, of course… but once you call someone out for being a Nancy Boy in front of others, it sticks. So occasionally, that term gets thrown around the club, and I try my hardest not to turn my head and answer when it’s called out…. but it’s starting to stick, damn it.
I’ve DX8 something.
So, I picked up a Spektrum DX8 recently. I don’t fly Spektrum anymore, I’ve pretty much converted to Airtronics at this point. I love the SD-10G. So programmable… So geeky. It’s that geeky-ness however that convinced me to purchase the DX8. I wanted to try it out, try out some telemetry, and even experience some vibration feedback when it’s time to land (on a side note – if there’s a transmitter to get females into the hobby, it’s probably this one). I’ll probably do some follow up videos with binding and dual rates/expo like I did with the dx6 and 7 at some point. Currently, I plan on using the DX8 for all of my bind-n-fly foamies and extra combat fliers. That’s right… The primary plane my DX8 will fly costs 1/5 of the transmitter itself. I think I may becoming a RC hoarder collector.
It’s getting late, and I need to drive to Syracuse for some non-RC related training tomorrow, so I’ll stick with this for now. To leave you with something graphical, here’s a shot I took of some new and old night flyer craft I’ve worked on this summer. That reminds me, I could make an article on those as well, beyond the basic night flying series… So much to do… so little time.
I’m Eric R. Krystof of Hover and Smile, and thanks for reading.
