Where B25 Kit?

The -25 can be gotten from Ziroli and the -3 from Tower.

A B25 "builder's kit" (lots of work) can be purchased from hobbybarn.com. This is the Marutaka (old Royal) kit. It is said to fly well.

Jim - AMA 501383

lider wrote:

Thanks for your information "James D Jones" escribió en el mensaje news: snipped-for-privacy@news.teranews.com...

My best R/C buddy just finished his Marutaka kit. It does fly like a dream, rock solid performance. It is reputed to be the best flyer that royal ever put out. Can't say the same for the B-17. Another friend finished a B-17 last summer. It only flew one time, it was unstable and crashed after a few laps around the field. It flew well enough at high speed (very unscale-like), but spiraled out of the sky when flown more realistically.

Tom

Never heard of a Maratuka kit flying badly, except where the builder got something really wrong.

Odds are better than even that the B-17 crash was installed on the bench.

Cheers, Fred McClellan The House Of Balsa Dust home.mindspring.com/~the-plumber

Fred,

No disrespect but, the B-17 builder is a very experienced modeler. He has been in the hobby for decades, flies small and giant scale planes with precision and does first class work. I doubt if the problem was in a construction error. It is the first time I have seen him crash in four years. Having seen the poor performance and heard two people (with more experience than me) say that the B-17 was not that great a flyer, I assumed there may be a grain of truth to it. Of course, a data base of one eyewitness (me) and two opinions is not exactly good statistical science... but it did comprise 60% of those present at the time of the crash. Those kinds of stats are good enough for every politician! Maybe they just wanted him to feel good?

There is one other possibility, which did not reveal itself to me until now. Just last week I lost my P-38 in the same spot that his spiraled into the ground last summer. I was doing a leg upwind when the plane momentary failed to respond to aileron and rudder to turn it back. It did respond seconds later only to spiral toward the ground (with loss of radio control again), but I got it back about 40 feet off the deck, leveled off, and climbed high. As I started my downwind leg, again it spiraled out of control, hitting the deck this time. Post-crash showed the battery to be fully charged and all gear working properly, and soundly attached. Come to think of it, I had the same problem with my AT-6 in the same spot last summer too. I changed radio gear and things did not improve. I had flown my AT-6 several times between these flights with no problems. I fly on channel 09 in the Ham band and the B-17 pilot was on a 72 MHz xmtr. So no strong conclusions there, either.

BTW The Great Planes P-38 is a great model. It flies very well. The only real problem is the weak structure in the booms. 1/4" X 1/4" balsa frame with 1/16" balsa sheet on both sides. The rest of the plane is extraordinarily tough. I have crashed mine three times now and it will still live to fly again. (O.K. O.K. Now you're saying to yourself, "This guy is a bozo pilot.") Let me try to explain... : ) On flight number two I noticed cracked booms while cleaning up the plane (not technically a crash, but it still required splints and glue). On flight number nine I made a two hop landing that cartwheeled and smashed the booms to bits. The right engine flew off (Crash 2). That one was clearly pilot error. I re-glued the re-glued booms and on the twelfth flight (is that a Shakespear play?) is when it spiraled into the ground. In all these mishasps the wing, tail feathers, fuse pod, landing gear, and control surfaces remained untouched. This last time the left engine flew off on impact, but neither prop was even broken. I think I wil re-glue the re-glued, re-glued booms because they seem to break first, saving damage to the rest of the plane. Mayb GP did it on purpose?

(Blah, blah, Tom. Go to bed already!) : )

Tom

I have seen some Marutaka (Royal) kits end up very heavy due to the construction techniques used. These "kits" are sometimes a box of wood blocks with instructions to shape like the drawings.

I have the P6E. Yes, the cowl was formed by carving a balsa block. Mine turned out great. They included parts for making a nice dummy exhaust setup, and my OS 70 fits entirely within the cowl. Sure, that's more work, but it's light and quite functional. In my case, the weight savings didn't pay off. I had to put 12 oz. of lead in the bottom of the cowl for balance. I may still have the CG a bit too far back. It's a bit too pitch sensitive for my skill level.

The rest of the kit is traditional built-up construction. The only thing I didn't like was the setup for the ailerons. It called for cables and bellcranks to operate a rod between the lower wing and ailerons on the upper wing. That was far too sloppy for my taste, so I used two miniservos instead.

It sure does look great, though.

Jim - AMA 501383

Paul Mc> I have seen some Marutaka (Royal) kits end up very heavy due to the

Yup.

Doesn't take any particular talent to build a flying pig.

'course, one can do that with almost _any_ manufacturer's kit unless it's an ARF, and even they can tip the scales well past design parameters if the hardware installation is all wrong. Cheers, Fred McClellan The House Of Balsa Dust home.mindspring.com/~the-plumber

Neither did I mean to disparage the builder, particularly since I have no idea who it may be.

I've simply never heard anyone complain about Maratuka kits, ever, except when it turned out they'd got something very wrong somewhere.

I would think if the B-17 was a known bad flyer we'd have heard a lot more about it, like the infamous peeling cylinder liners, certain aerobatic models shedding wings, and so on.

The odd behavior of _other models_ in the same area is something to follow up on, though.

I know of one field which, unless they've changed things around their sun shelter with it's original tin roof, had a no-man's land about 100 feet out and 20 feet up from the 000 approach.

I could reliably and predictably get FM equipped models to have a momentary snit while passing through that window, where the most notable thing was a throttle excursion you could hear, and I'm half deaf.

AM equipped models didn't miss a beat no matter how many times I tried.

The culprit was multipath interference in the FM receivers, and it was the particular arrangement of the sun shelter tin roof, an ungrounded chain link fence, and a set of metal light poles.

Avoid the 'window', no problem. Fly through the window, glitch ever time.

FWIW. Cheers, Fred McClellan The House Of Balsa Dust home.mindspring.com/~the-plumber