Wow, am I ever grateful for all of the hits my article on the Raiden Tech Zero Fighter-25 over at "RC Power Magazine" has received! Thanks, all. I sure do hope it'll be of help.

I'm up to ten flights and all is well. The only weak spot is the landing gear. The wire is way too soft. Even the gentlest landings bend 'em up, popping off the decorative covers and basically making the plane a bit pigeon-toed on its way back to the taxiway.

Some 1/8" piano wire is about to be procured and worked.

Do follow the build thread another user had left in the comment section. Apparently, not all of Raiden Technology's models are the clear-cut bargain this one is. If anything happens to this model, I might even soften my stance against the company's lack of parts support and customer service and order up antoher one.

UPDATE BELOW! Too funny. Do read on.

I promise: No more after this. You can call me on it if I do, OK? I'm only ranting since it's somewhat relevant to the hobby of R/C.

So here I was, giving my one more try, um, one more try. Frankly, I'm fresh out of ideas for new content and playing "whack-a-mole" with vandals, spammers and the generally clueless gets tiring.

I'd seen a newspaper article not long ago on a historic toy store-cum-hobby shop here in the Palm Springs area. The Palm Springs Historical Society was actually giving out authentic samples of the store's very distinctive wrapping paper which they'd acquired from the original owner of the store.

I found the article archived online. The notability factor sure looked like it met standards. Thought it might link nicely to the Riverside County category.

No sooner had I finished the article than WHAM! An editor whacked it with a deletion proposal tag.

I saw red. Big time. In fact, I had the closest thing to a cyber-hissy fit one can have. I'll leave out the details.

To make a long story even longer, the subsequent deletion discussion is now roughly three times the length of the original article which took less than ten minutes to bang out in the first place.

Has any good come out of all this, you might ask? Yes and no.

The no: I just stressed out over a little "stub article" that wouldn't pass muster in an eighth-grade composition class, it was so...Continue Reading

...but my HPI Savage needs tranny work. Again. My fault.

The centrifugal device that holds the two-speed gear cluster together and allows it to shift up and down is factory calibrated based on RPMs. There's no rough baseline, say two turns in. Adjusting it too far inward will squash the little coil spring that makes it happen. Surprisingly delicate part for such a brutal machine.

I squashed the whee out of mine when I cinched the bolt all the way down, thinking all the while I was tightening the retaining bolt.

Needless to say, the thing doesn't shift. Out the tranny must come.

A new retainer is on order. Another eight bucks goes bye-bye. Oh, well.

However, the high winds that are currently plaguing my part of the world weren't bad this morning, so up went the Zero for flight number four. A couple of flying buddies were there who fly considerably larger birds; they were impressed. One of them might be getting one for himself. He plans to stuff a .28 in it and go dogfighting.

I dig this hobby.

I must be nuts.

I gave Wikipedia another go.

Now I'm questioning my sanity.

I did some good edits including a few on R/C topics of which there are few. I'm the one who added most of them over the last few years. However, I have low tolerance for vandals and they're worse than ever. Nearly 100 percent of new users add pure nonsense and get their yuks contesting the deletion of their idiocy. Teens and preteens posting insult pages, college students who can't spell adding nonsense, spam...the list goes on. No wonder the academic world thinks it's useless. Frankly, I have no tolerance for people screwing up a good resource which is what these idiots are doing and over which I can't seem to break away. If this is what it's like to be really addicted to something negative, patrolling new pages on Wikipedia sure does qualify. I believe I have a level of integrity. I research my subjects and either write from scratch or add facts. Sometimes I'm wrong and I either correct myself or another editor catches the error.

If you want to absolutely howl with laughter, go to www.theonion.com and search for Wikipedia.

I quit nineteen months ago and returned for a brief period between September '06 and January '07. Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but it isn't going to fix that site. So, if you please, exit stage right, quietly and with no fanfare or page blanking.

I'll just rant here and continue to try and put a smile on your face and info in your head, on a site dedicated to a single subject we all love. In fact, my new article on my new plane has nearly 160 hits and it's not even available yet for public view.

Viva RC Groups!

Now that cooler weather is returning to my corner of the world, so too are the seasonal visitors. Who'd a-thunk the club would be as busy as it was on a Thursday morning?

But I digress. Lots of great planes out there today and lots of great flying. One poor fellow on a buddy box got a bit discombobulated and did the proverbial unscheduled landing with his Sig Kadet. Glad to say it'll be OK, but it's going to need some surgery up front.

The club president is starting an R/C aerial photography business and he brought out his big, mean Century helicopter with its 26cc gasoline two-stroke. Doggone thing looked lethal, but it hovered as nice as you please. I wouldn't have minded some stick time on his 14VZ, let me tell you.

Ah, but that new Zero. How I wish that Raiden Tech stood behind their product. This thing is a ball, plain and simple. For eighty bucks, it's a steal. However, no parts support on their end means no financial support on mine.

I managed to sort out a minor fuel problem on the bench; the inverted cylinder made idling difficult. Took the advice of Da Prez and ran a looped line to the carb to increase the siphon effect. Bingo! The idle was perfect with near-zero thrust.

One thing's for sure, though. I'm taking it real easy with this bird and I'm not letting it get too far from me, a tall order considering how fast it is even with a .25 under the cowl. That olive drab and light grey camo works as it should. Too well. Even with its 49" wingspan and my 20/15 eyesight, it got hard to see real fast. A bit scary taking it out far. So, future runs will be made a bit closer to the flight deck.

We're under a wind advisory...grounded until Sunday at the very least.

There's always the RealFlight sim.

Well, my very first review is done! The article has been "promoted," as it were. However, I seem to be having trouble formatting it for photos, so an admin with deep access to the site is going to give it a once-over and then release it for public consumption.

Darned if I didn't get the HPI Savage back together and running, but it'll have to come apart again. If you own a Savage, you know that a transmission removal means taking half the chassis apart.

The tranny works insofar as it gets power to the ground, but it won't shift. Adjusting the shift point engages either high or low. Ergo, it either bogs down like a salted slug off the line or it leaves the line hard and fast and basically goes not much of anywhere after that. The internal clutch retainer ring(?) is factory assembled and calibrated. It's only eight bucks, but it means excising the tranny yet again. I can take the time to double-check my assembly and make sure that I didn't goof. Next time I need to overhaul the transmission will likely mean that I'll try out the available three-speed. From what I understand, it's reasonably priced and greatly improves the top end. Yeah, like it isn't fast enough already with a Wasp 28!

The "weather guessers" predict windy days ahead, so I might not be able to scratch my R/C itch. Nuts. I just did some mechanical and electronic adjustments on the Blade CP and it flies almost as nice as a T-Rex. Notice I said "almost." I don't want to torque off any T-Rex users, especially since I happen to want to join that particular club.

There's also the new Raiden Tech Zero which still has only two flights on it. Double nuts.

I guess I can take the time to straighten out my workbench while waiting for the transmission part.