OK, it's project time!

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.