Well... I was flying my rc-planes at Hämeenkyrö airfield last Saturday and everything went great for seemingly the first time in a loooong time. This summer has been nothing but troubles it seems.
At the beginning of the summer I was participating in a pattern competition in Kuopio with my 50-sized electric conversion. Of course, the thing had to quit working just then and I didn't manage to practice at all. The competition was to be on the next day so during the night I spent my time well. A friend of mine happened to have brought a well used .40 cu.in. engine for spare parts. It was missing half of the screws and the rear bearing!
We didn't let that stop us so we found some random screws and bolts and managed to rebuild the engine and even mount it on the firewall of my plane. Of course I wasn't prepared to fly a glow powered plane so I didn't have, for example, a fuel tank so I built a tank out of a plastic bottle with a lot of epoxy.
A spare servo and fuel tube was fond and there I was, set to compete the next day! The engine ran, but quit on two rounds out of three and the plane was way underpowered but it flew!
http://www.f3a.fi/photos/kuopio2008/IMG_4568.JPG/Here I am with my glorious plane.
After a couple of weeks there was a weekend dedicated for pattern practice in Turku so there I was with a different plane, a 50-sized Giles 202. My engine was giving me some trouble (The same that cut my finger, by the way.) It just wouldn't run reliably and I made a bit of a hard landing and broke the landing gear on Friday. I decided that I just had to fix it but the plywood it was attached to was broken into many pieces. Luckily I had brought a piece of plywood for a friend of mine to make a couple of firewalls of it so I took a saw blade and started slowly sawing a new landing gear fixing plate out of it. I did make it and flew a couple of flights but as the engine didn't like to work I didn't manage to fly very much.
On the beginning of July I was participating in a pylon racing event at Jämi airfield and I managed to have one good flight before the glow plug on my engine broke and the glow element was right there between the piston and cylinder head, jamming the whole thing and scratching the insides of the engine to a point of being almost useless... I managed to clean the engine and running it again but it the loss of performance was too much so the competition didn't go too well for me...
And I participated on one more contest this summer. It was pattern aerobatics and was held at Ahmosuo airfield in Oulu. Everything started fine, I managed to take a practice flight on Friday evening and I thought I'd start early on Saturday so I could take a couple more flights before the competition starts. Well... It didn't quite go as planned as I was landing the plane and overshoot, I pushed the throttle and pulled the elevator to take another try but the engine didn't agree with me. So the plane tip-stalled into the ground. Not much pattern flying done by me on that weekend...
Well I hope my luck is turning now as the indoor flying season is getting closer and closer.
