February 2020 – Frédéric Zamit

Joyrider: Horizontal Stabilizer

The landing gear’s completion left only one step to finish the structural work: the tailplane. I copped out for a while to face this step because the tail plane ultimately makes or breaks the aircrafts stearability:

If it’s too small, you can’t control the model aircraft. If it’s too big, the bird responds like a proper boulder. This effect is additionally influenced by the fuselage’s length, as I’ve already mentioned while building the fuselage. That’s why I’m really glad to have found Christian Forrer’s web site, including an excel sheet for calculating model dimensions, before I started constructing my biplane in earnest. Based on the finished parts, I was able to determine the minimum size for the tail plane and get on with it.

Winter Operation Session 2020

01 Porter pulling 101 Stake Wagon.

Last Saturday, an old friend of mine and I held a small operation session at his place. The weather was fabulous, we had high temperatures for february, around 14°C and lots of sunshine.

It’s been a huge success: multiple trains running simultaneously, shunting, test drives, lots of talk on lots of topics. But most important: a train-load of fun!

Shunting Dice for Operating Sessions

Triangles glued, body painted.

The operation session which a good friend of mine and I are planning is approaching. It’s going to be a premiere in more than one aspect: we haven’t done joint operations for a long time; it’s also been a long time since we did some shunting; and we’re going to try and let children participate.

So the question stands: How can we combine interesting operations with as few rules as possible and as little preparations as possible? Enter *drumroll* the shunting dice.

Timber Cargo for Bulkhead

Loaded and secured.

In preparation for the next driving session at a friend’s of mine, I focused on Bulkhead #101. (By default, which other waggons do I possess right now?)

The little darling is supposed to serve as a coupling adapter (knuckle coupling at the front, LGB’s “bottle opener” at the rear). So that it can excel in the task, the waggon needs some additional weight, which I provided by means of a timber load. And in order to keep the latter in place, some fastening had to be added.