That critter in the photo below was one which came with two other models, both of which have been mentioned in previous blogs and are pictured below. Both are decade-old E-flite examples and both fly great after some loving. One is an Adagio 280 motor glider and the other is a Mini Ultra-Stick.

What this .55-powered model is is anyone's guess. It's a sport plane, obviously kit built and fairly good sized with a 6' wingspan. More importantly, it came with an O.S. .55 which is still very much in production! New o-rings for the needle valve are on order and while the crankcase as a small chunk taken out of it near the rear muffler mounting bolt, it doesn't appear to be critical. Even the fuel tank appears to be in good shape and it'll get a new pickup hose.

Incredibly, it has standard Futaba servos! Three in the fuse and one on the wing working torque rods for the ailerons.

I bought a strip of self-adhesive Monokote trim so that I can easily fix some small rips in the covering. I also bought a new tail wheel. I already had a brand new motor mount on hand. To sum up, this will be a seriously low-buck project!

UPDATE: The new tail wheel is in place. Better still, I had two new/old 2.25" Du-Bro wheels with rubber tires on hand which replaced the narfed-out 2.5" Du-Bro foamies. All of the servos work and the little rips in the covering have been patched. I even covered that bare wood behind the pilot bust! On to that torn covering visible on the right wingtip. I'll do it in more of that Insignia Blue trim.

You'd think that cleaning old castor oil off a glow engine would be no big deal, right? Conventional wisdom states that the engine be torn down and baked in a crock pot full of antifreeze.

Thanks to a thread here at RCG, I solved the problem for a buck.

A concentrated spray cleaner is sold at Dollar Tree under the unlikely brand of LA's Totally Awesome.

Guess what? It is. Some of that cleaner with help from an old toothbrush cleaned the O.S. .25 on the Spitfire like new! It also did an incredible job of cleaning the little "rat plane" .25 high wing in my last blog. I'm going to buy an soft scrub brush and really give it a once-over.

The FlyFly Duke build is proceeding nicely and I was reminded of a couple of things. For starters, I recall scrounging the main retracts for use in another model after they both stopped working. The ones from the crashed model worked fine and just for looks, I'm using the three new struts from the kit.

One of the motor cowls had a small chip in the paint; the inspection number is from the review model. I used one from the kit for looks so that there wasn't a little white spot jumping out in the photos. Some small disc magnets from Harbor Freight will hold those cowls in place once I get the ESCs. The magnets work perfectly!

Photos on the way. Getting these models ready has been a ton of fun so far!

While waiting for the parts for the FlyFly Duke about which I've recently blogged, I decided to do another project which has turned into two!

By the way, it was a failure of one of the ESCs which led to the crash of the first Duke. The signal wire and its PC board pad lifted clean off the board and there's no trace. Besides, something caused the problem in the first place, right?

Project number one is a Great Planes .25 Spitfire sport plane with its inverted O.S. Max 25. I bought the airframe after I stuffed in my Nitroplanes Zero and I haven't flown it in many a year.

It's complete down to the Futaba FASST receiver which somehow avoided being scrounged for another model at some point. The carb is now free and parts to complete it are on order.

The big news is the mystery .25 which I got several years ago from an RCG poster. It was either come and get it or it's going in the trash! The OP lived near my brother who picked it up and brought it to me. Prior to today, I hadn't even tried to clean it. Fabuloso is great stuff if you don't mind a model which smells like lavender potpourri and old wood...but it isn't quite strong enough in diluted form to cut the crud on this poor little plane. The engine has like-new compression and a freely moving carb. I'm going to keep the "rat rod patina" but I'll replace all of the hardware, install a fuel tank and install new electronics. The airframe is wonderfully solid and well built. A friend sent me a couple of stickers which depict a truly bizarre online cartoon character which can be found here. One might find its way onto the wing, but we'll see.