In case you weren't aware of the fact, Palm Springs is one of the windiest places on earth. Every so often, we get one heck of a blow...and today it is blowing! Gonna be like this the rest of the week.

Bad for planes.

Good excuse to put the new Wasp .28 engine in the Savage 25.

Team Orion was kind enough to quite literally handbuild an engine for me. I had so much hassle with the old one that Rick Hohwart himself stepped in and helped me out.

However, it sat on my shelf for a bit until I brought it in to the hobby shop so that they could install a Robinson Racing flywheel and a new clutch.

Sat there for a month and a half. They were having problems getting the flywheel to shim correctly, but all is now well.

So, here's hoping everything lines up correctly and I'll be screaming down the street once I break in this new engine.

Ah, if only most industries were as dedicated to customer service as our hobby manufacturers are...thank you, Orion. For the record, I called the tech department right after I got the engine back from them and I thanked both Rick and the gentleman responsible for most of the build.

While I'm on the subject of blogging, I thought that I should share something that's been bothering me for some time now.

Wikipedia has about 43,000 registered editors in good standing. Fewer than 1000 are administrators. Obviously, I'd quit at least once before. Just go back to my first entry here.

I am - or at least was - one of those thousand.

I spent four years writing and editing subjects ranging from full-scale railroading to classic cars and not a mere few on radio control.

Waste of time? Perhaps.

Wikipedia is a grand experiment and a noble vision gone horribly awry. There are more vandals than good users at any given time and I frequently found myself faced with the Sisyphean task of cleaning up after these yahoos.

I've found evidence on the internet of coordinated efforts on the parts of disgruntled individuals to discredit administrators...and I fell victim. These jerks sign up, do some reasonably good editing and then sneak in bizarre edits designed to catch the attention of an admin. When the admin cleans up the mess, the attacks begin. Worse, the "community" seems to be letting it happen.

Jimbo Wales, the site's founder, is a decent person. I only wish that he would step in to help clean up this cyber-playpen of his, now overrun by high schoolers creating nonsense pages and spammers from all over the globe, not to mention these destructive users of the type I just mentioned.

The upshot? I still edit at a neat little independent wiki dedicated to electric flight. It's called www.eflightwiki.com and virtually everything that I wrote on Wikipedia may be found there. I edit under this same user name.

Lots of good info there; I hope you'll stop by.

As far as Wikipedia is concerned, cold turkey never tasted so good.

Well, it's been another six months and I'm still flying the P-47 as often as the weather allows which, thankfully, is quite often here in the desert regions of Southern California.

I've had to make a grand total of two repairs in all this time, both to the ailerons. Not a lot of foam holding the control horns in place. My trusty E-flite 4200kv Park 400 finally up and quit. The new one works perfectly.

Correction: I had to replace the spur gear a couple of times when the old motor came apart in flight and I've had to CA the top of the tail back on a few occasions. The plane sometimes noses over on the roughish surface I fly on and off of. I've learned to keep the landing gear bent forward.

I'm all over the sky with this bird. Immelmans, loops, rolls, inverted flight, hammerheads...just too much fun. Vertical victory rolls right after takeoff are pretty much expected of me by the Sunday morning flight crew. In the event that "dumb thumbs," mechanical failure or act of God cause this plane to act as a core sampling tool, I will immediately march into the hobby shop for a replacement.

The Blade CP is hopped up now that I can actually fly it...whoa! Doggone little thing is FAST. Real easy to get disoriented if it gets too far away.

The old ParkZone J-3 now has Team Orion Slow-Max power and real radio gear. What a difference!

The latest addition is a FlyZone Cessna 182. Neat little plane, but I had some motor problems out of the box which damaged the rest of the plane due to lack of power on landing, now fixed. What a bargain!