Part 1 (by Clem)

10:00am: Cold, windy at 8 mph direct cross from the west. Did I mention cold? And no Kruse in sight. Steve, Ron B., Corky, Chip, and Clem tried it, but didn’t like it. While 50 degrees won’t seem cold at the January chili fly, it was today. Chip even took leave from work to be there, but probably regretted it as he spent most of the time fighting a new K&B 61 engine that had some more to go on the break in. He got in one flight daring not to go to idle, lest it turn into a dead stick. The crosswind was too much for most of us, especially the Phoenix Telemaster. So we all gave up in about an hour. We blamed it on Larry not being there.

Part 2 (by Clem)

4:00 pm- In mid-afternoon I noticed the tree leaves were still and the temp was about 70. I could not stand it and packed up again and headed to the field. It was warm, nearly calm, beautiful, with a gentle (2 mph) wind blowing straight down the runway from the South. (Hopefully, Chip won’t read this). Ron B. was there flying his beautiful aerobat. Clem showed up and got in almost 2 hours of flying the Telemaster practicing both wheel landings and 3-point landings. It was a perfect day for flying. Buddy even arrived anxious to maiden his Corsair and a Cessna. Clem agreed to do the test flights. First, the transmitter batteries seemed exhausted as the system failed the range check. That solved, courtesy of some spare AAs that Ron B. had, Clem discovered the motor hooked up backward making the airplane nearly fly off the workstand–backwards! Then Clem flew it. The Corsair flew well, though too sensitive in roll. Clem made a nice wheel landing which made Buddy very happy. Then on to the Cessna. After finding and correcting the reversed rudder and elevator and correcting the elevator sensitivity–it would have been good for doing 3D!, then it flew really nicely. In fact it was nearly a perfect flyer. After a couple low slow passes and a touch and go around to a full stop flown by Clem, Buddy was thrilled and ready to go get some more airplanes from his collection. He’s just happy to see them fly. But if you fly them for him, double check everything for servo direction, throws, CG, prop direction, range, etc and do it every time. Since they are RTF foamies, they generally will fly well if the system is installed correctly. They were pretty in the air and once the initial bugs were corrected, everything went fine until the Cessna’s full stop when the prop flew off because the prop nut was not on tight enough. I missed that on the pre-flight. Ron and Buddy departed about 5:30, then Clem flew for another 30 minutes working on fine tuning the Telemaster in the pattern. With no wind, it was a joy to fly unlike it was this morning. Flying Part Deaux was nearly perfect, but still no Larry.

Part 3 (by Chip)

It was a K&B .65 Sportster…flew the 22-year-old transformed 7+ lb ARF just great, even though tuned well on the fat side for break-in (yeah, still has a way to go on the break-in). Dropped to idle while crossing the numbers, dead-stick shortly thereafter, smooth landing. Wind was steady and no problem once in flight. Ground handling was near impossible.

Notice to club members – I left the baffle in the muffler on the Sportster as it does lower and mellow the exhaust note nicely. However, I was shocked to discover that I could not hear the motor over Corky’s persistent oral exhaust, so I will remove the baffle from the Sportster prior to the next flying opportunity.

…paging Dr. Kruse…

That is all.

Part 4 (by Larry)

You’ll not believe how Larry spent his day.

Every other Thursday Cel get her nails done at Charlie’s Nails. As I was getting ready to load up and come to the flying field, Cel called and said that two ladies outside the nail salon heard a kitten meow and it sounded like it was coming from Cel’s car. She checked the interior, but not being a graduate of ITT Tech, she wasn’t sure how to get under the hood and check for the cat, so she called me.

I went into town, popped the hood, checked all over and found—nothing, even after checking the undercarriage carefully and any other conceivable place a cat could hide. I drove her car home, heard nothing, and put it in the garage.

Later, as I was setting the throws on my new “Somethin’ Extra”, Cel came in from the garage saying she had heard the cat again. My surmise was that it was up under one of the plastic shields that new cars have all over their bottom sides, so I determined that I’d take it to the Jim Norton Toyota and have them put it up on the rack where we could see everything.

The mechanics were kind and helpful, even using an air hose to blow up under all of the several shields and perhaps dislodge the cat from its hiding place. The result? Nothing.

I drove her car home left it outside the garage for a couple of hours with the hood popped, thinking that the cat might get discouraged and just leave, if it was indeed still there someplace.

About 4:00 I went out to the garage and drove the car in— and heard the plaintive sounds of a cat—this time coming from the single car area of the garage that houses my lawn tractor, assorted lawn tools, a snow-blower, wheel barrow and assorted kit boxes I was saving to ship eBay stuff. I was relieved that it was out of Cel’s car and I wouldn’t have to deal with dead cat odor later on in the week.

I decided to carefully move every item from the single car side of the garage out onto the driveway and dislodge the cat. Success! When I moved the snow blower, a tiny black kitten (seemingly in good health and quite spry) shot out from the inside of the snow blower…made a bee-line for the side of the garage where both cars were now parked…and got up under Cel’s car again.

At this moment, it still resides there–and although we can hear it from time to time, we can’t see it from underneath the car. We now have food, water, and a litter box set up back on the single car side of the garage and will get a feral cat trap from our vet in the morning. The other choice is to simply raise it to an adult inside the garage and treat it as one of the family.

Geez. I would rather have been flying…although it appears that in either case I still would have gotten a heapin’ helpin’ of abuse.