The humming of my model airplane engine was overwhelming, it embodfied my excitement and my fears. I was carring my airplane to our launching area. It felt like a procession, to a judgement of my work.
The day our model airplanes came in was an exciting day. We had all wanted to start building them. There were so many pieces to each of these how could I, someone not known for my handywork, assemble all these pieces to work properly?
Gary Krettzler, our airplane assistant, took hold of my airplane, to perform the final checks on everyghing including seeing that the servos moved the control surfaces, and those surfaces were unobstructed and moved, then he ran with my plane to give it enough lift to take flight, if it would take flight. Then he began running with my airplane, my last chance to revaluate my handiwork was gone, I could no longer abort this planes mission, as Gary went with the takeoff throw, I went over my construction, the epoxing of my wings, running of the antenna, the assembly of some of the engin parts, all of this ran throught my head in one brief instant, and I worried, like a mother would worry about her child, about my plane.
With a snap of Gary's wrist my plane began flying. Flying was stressful. Unlike homework or directing a play I could not fix it in the final culminating moments.
“Now here's where we test the wings,” Gary explained, “lets just hope you epoxied them enought, or they'll break in two and the plane, and wings will fall to the ground.”
“Uhhh, O.K.,” I unnervingly blerted. Gary had really built up my confidence. Then with a few carefully orchestrated flips of the control sticks, my plane properly obeyed Gary's commands and began a loop.
I still remember the day we glued the wings together, Gary and Mrs. Kretzler had epoxied Kretz's wings together, it was a long process of putting epoxy, a two part mixture of resin and hardener that had the consistency of honey, on what seemed to be everything, the connecting spars, the wooden wing surfaces, every surface in this joing had to be covered, Gary had explained that we were going to make one big joint instead of several joints, which was how the instructions to our plane read, which left us less time to cover all the surfaces in this joint. My first step was to check the assembly of the three wooden spars, that physically held the wings together, these had to be fitted together so they would to into their respective slot on both wings, then after an extensive to trying what seemed to be every combination of spar I finally chose one stacking pattern that I liked the best for its fit in the wings. Next, I had to mix the epoxy in the correct 1:1 ratio. If I put too much of either in my wing would forever have a tacky bond. Epoxy unlike most adhesives was impossible to undo, once it dried you had better be happy with how it dried. Then, Gary helped me epoxy my wing, he had started using his finger to spread the epoxy right away, I was attempting to use a popsicle stick to spread the epoxy, but it seemed much harder than using Gary's method, so after some careful contemplation that lasted quarter second, I began emulating Gary, and his method was much easier. Finally Gary and I shoved all the parts together, this resulted in an eruption of epoxy everywhere over the wing. As I held the wing together the people who had already competed this messy task assisted the others by getting paper towels soaked in rubbing alchol, epoxy's only nemesis. Finally this huge contraption had to be braced, with my hands for about half an hour.
As the plane started to go upside down Gary, in his ever reassuring way commented, “Now this is the point where a wing will break in two if it will break in two.”
“I hope that wing holds together,” I nervosuly thought. I felt a sigh of relief as the plane came out of its loop, that messy epoxy had paid off.
Now that I knew the wing would hold I switched my worries to the servos, I knew that their tray was slightly damaged, and I guessed that servos, unlike wings would take much longer than the wings to fail, their stresses were more varied, so it took longer for them to break down.