Ordered a 1/2A Skyray kit

TLAnderson wrote:When it completed the first circle, it was just a little too low, and it hit the platform. Not good.


Bummer, but I got many more flights out of this plane than I expected to. So ends the story of this Skyray. Might have to build another one.

Keith Laumer wrote:Rebuilding a wreck
The old ship was a dandy, but one day a combination of high wind, a bad launch, and a premature power cutoff brought her in on the concrete runway like a ton of bricks. Pieces flew for fifty feet along the pavement, and when the dust cleared, the rear half of the fuselage was here, part of the front end there, the engine lay twenty feet away minus prop blades, the wing was folded in mid-panel, and the rudder was knocked clean off the elevator. It was a total washout.

At this point the philosophical modeler might sigh regretfully, gather up the big pieces just for the sake of tidying up, salvage the wheels and the engine, and start planning a new model.

The modeler with a few rebuilding tricks up his sleeve would have the same ship back in the air within a couple of hours. In the shattered fragments of a model plane, there is a big investment in your time. Most of this investment can be recovered by careful and systematic salvage.

The first thing to do is examine the remains before the helpful small boys in the area have descended on them and borne away trophies. Often by quick action you can prevent further damage. Perhaps a component is cracked but still hanging together; don't let it get pulled completely apart. Shattered balsa is easy to cement if the fibers are still in place, but it's hard to fit together two pieces that have been pulled completely apart cross-grain. If the ship is engine-powered, mop up spilled fuel and oil in a hurry; you can't cement oil-soaked balsa. And gather up every tiny fragment; you can fit them back together like a jigsaw puzzle, and they'll be stronger than ever.