Phil Zuidema was kind enough to step in for David Andersen this month to assist in generating the December Newsletter.

Big thanks from all of us Phil for helping out during the busy Holiday season.

This Months Meeting Was Very Well

Attended Despite Being Very Close to

 Christmas ... Thanks to All for Your Support!

Cal Branton, our Prez opened the meeting with a wistful observation about his dot matrix printer, and how many carbons it could make.

Brian Crosley reported that there were no new developments on the horizon as it pertained to Tri-Valley obtaining a flying site.  Some discussion ensued about what to do with the money in the treasury.  Some suggested that it could go to the AMA.  Maybe a young person to obtain a trainer plane and radio, you never know where R/C knowledge could lead them!

Cal remarked that he hadn’t seen a Tri-Valley newsletter for a while.

Joe Niedermayr spoke about a Dornier 217 that he is working on.  This is a WWII German bomber that had twin engines in wing nacelles.  In each nacelle housed a landing gear mechanism.  Joe demonstrated the operating landing gear which he had scratch built.  He employed struts purchased from Hobby King.

Joe also noted that it took 30% more training for pilots in order to become competent flyers.  The aircraft used two BMW engines for power with 18 of 100 built lost in combat.  The others were lost to piloting error or mechanical failures.

Phil Zuidema brought a www.Warbirdspilots.com Pilot distributed by Troy Built Models Pilot that is a very authentic and detailed scale pilot.  These pilots are hand made and have slight variations and come in 1/6 & 1/5th scale. 

Please note that these are drop shipped, so you going to [ay a separate $7 flat USPS shipping fee per pilot if you use TBM's shopping cart.

Last Month ... David Andersen presented a 1/5th scale MG-15 machine gun as used in the Stuka, Ki-45 Nick and other WWII aircraft.  This gun was made with a 3D printing device that Dave described briefly.  He mentioned that he would make available the 3D CAD files of this gun with the plans of the Ki-45 and here within our website. 

Free Download Files Available Here!

These open source "sizable" files are available for download to make the part shown on the left with your 3D printer.

  CAD Files - Zip Files

If you'd rather purchase ... Go to  www.ScaleRCParts.com

Dan Schmidt brought his Pfalz D XII.  The wingspan was around 48 inches and uses a 480 E-Flight motor.  He covered with Polyspan. 

He painted it with Minwax water-based polyurethane.  Color were applied with Martha Stewart’s latex paint, using Frogtape for masking.  He said, “Frogtape doesn’t bleed.”  The plane uses shock absorbing Robart struts.

At our October meeting, Ahmed Bassal’s brought his scratch built fifth-scale Tucano.  His all-composite airplane required 18 molds, including the wing.  The structure is HRV honeycomb and fiberglass.  The nose is carbon fiber.

This month he brought his Canopy that is made from ELET 0.05” plastic which Ahmed says forms more easily than the polycar-bonate counter part.

Thanks to Scott Anderson for the additional photos this month!

Keep Your Eye on the Horizon for Gear Magic, Jim Lake has done it again ... making scale aircraft functionality easy and user controlled!

The whole idea is that a user can enter the servo timings for the gear and the gear doors into a windows app.  The timings are measured from the time the gear switch is flipped on the R/C transmitter.  To use it, just plug in the USB cable into the Gear Magic module and on your computer you use the software to load the timings into the Gear Magic module.

The Windows App will self install on any windows machine. The user gets a CD in the package or he can download it from the website.

The building is straight forward and to his surprise Santa provided some landing gear struts!