My New Stik is mort!

The airplane was built so flimsy that the crash did it in.  Besides I do not have any covering to use.  The covering used in the original is sort of like shelf paper.  Very cheap stuff.  Dare not get it to hot or you have an instant hole in the stuff.

So it was fling.  A cheap fling.  Now I know why I pay more for a Great Plaines kit or Almost Ready to Fly (ARF) kit.  It is substantially stronger and better built. 

I have a Stik in the box and probably will put it together when I get the old New Horizons Ultra-Stik back in the air.  I will have to use a servo out of the cheap Stik to finish off the old bird.

Just not in the mood to go out and build at the moment.  Got to get my juices up and running again.

Damn, it is hard getting old.

My Old Stik . . .

A while back I crashed my old Ultra Stik by Horizon Hobbies.  The engine just was not developing power and it ran into the field electric fence wire.  The wire did a number on the wing, easily repaired and broke the fuselage in half.  At first I was going to trash can the old Stik but then I saw it was easy to repair.

So I have been fixing it back.  Quite a bit of fibre glass patches putting the fuselage back together.  I had to epoxy in the wing mount again in the fuselage.  I had to reinstall the firewall where the engine mounts up front.  And I had to add a new cover over the top front of the fuselage.  The fact that that piece was off allowed me to make special repairs to the forward wing mount and strengthen the forward fuselage.  I got that all fixed and then added the new top.

I had to recover the forward fuselage, the colors no longer match.  I used a lot of MonoKote solid red and it went over spots that were formally covered by a clear yellow cover.  So it is more red now than before.

I had to fix the wing center regluing some decking and had to make a few new reinforcement plywood patches.  Those were epoxied on, wing mount holes redrilled, etc.  I still have to cover some of that area.  But the wing is back being very flyable.

I found a bad spot in the tail feathers, the horizontal surface a separated from the fuselage part way.  So I had to reglue that back.  I used TiteBond wood glue for that.  I also had to put a cover patch on and it too is red.  Not to noticeable but considerable stronger aft section now.

I have to reinstall some wing servos and finish up the wing.  But not much more to do.  I installed the engine again.  I am going to have to work on the throttle hook up.  I have one but it is not working as it should and I will need to rework all that.  Not hard to do but just more work to be done.  I think I am going to have to result in using a cable hook up vice a solid wire.  The solid wire does not give me the flexibility I need, so gotta be done.

It will fly again!  The Phoenix rises from the ashes!

My New Stik . . .

I purchased the cheap new 60 sized Stik that I read about in an RC forum.  It was cheap.  Not only in price but everything else.  I had to make a lot of modifications to suit my taste but it is there and I have flown in four times.  I have a Magnum .90 four stroke engine on it.

But I had fuel tank problems.  At first I thought it was the clunk getting trapped in the front of the fuel tank.  That happens when you have an abrupt stop while landing.  And I had one.  The landing gear had come loose and of course there was no roll out.  That was easily fixed, I installed new screws on the landing gear and this time used Lock-Tite on the mounting screws and they are not vibrating out anymore.

But the flights were limited, short duration which usually means a problem in the fuel tank.  The usual fix is to very violently shake of the aircraft with an aft motion with a quick stop.  The inertia usually makes the clunk come loose and all is well.  That did not work.

So I took fuel tank out.  In this airplane that is easy to do, it is held in place by some old Styrofoam blocks.  So I just had to remove the blocks for access to the tank.  Got it out and took the bung off.  The bung has two holes in it with metal tubes, one tube is the fuel feed line and the other is the pressure line that comes off the muffler.  Well when I got the bung out, I found the feed line loose in the tank, it had come off the metal through tube.  I fished it out and threw it away.  I got some new fuel line and a heavier clunk and mounted it all up again.  Then I replace the tank and the Styrofoam blocks.  All done now.

I also had a trim problem with the wings, so I brought the wind inside to see what the problem was.  I have these neat servo checkers and little battery pack to power the checker and the servo.  And I found the left servo kind of skipping.  So I opened up the servo box and preceded to check things out.  I found the servo arm to loose.  I tightened up and noticed it was dragging on the exit slot a bit.  so I have trimmed some material off the slot and now the arm moves unimpeded.  Since I had messed with the control rods I had to reset them up again.  Easy to do, just takes a bit of patience to do it.  All is okay now with the wings.

So with a nice slow charge I will go fly again to check things out.  The Stik looks good but has its problems.  I do not think it will last very long and the covering is exceptionally poor.  It is not MonoKote, it really looks like cheap shelf paper that shrinks.  So I know there is no replacement of the covering if the bird gets damaged.  I have saved scraps here and there but those are small, good enough to take care of hangar rash but not much else.

The bird flies good enough.  We will see how long it lasts.  I am sure something will cause it to go down.  Time will tell.

Karen Galloway . . .

A while back I received a comment on a blog regarding Angeles Plantation from Karen Galloway.  I am paraphrasing but she said her family did business with J H Morrison which is my great great grandfather, Walter Christian Morrison's father.  She said she had never heard the names Brunswick or Angeles only names alike Morrison or Beaud.  She further said she had a sales receipt for or with JH Morrison.

I answered Karen and but got no reply.  I tried several times to trace her down.  I did eventually find a Karen Galloway but she had recently died.  So we missed each other.  Hopefully she is in heaven and now knows the whole story now.

I suspect Karen's family were slaves owned by J. H. Morrison before the Civil War.  That is a pity.  Many of the blacks on the plantations moved off  after the Civil War, who would blame them.  Some stayed on until the end of WW-II when virtually all of them moved off to towns like New Roads where some still reside today.  The plantation society died off for good reason, but I suspect the introduction of fuel powered machines greatly accelerated their departure.  Fewer workers were now needed on the farms with the mules and mule drivers being replaced by tractors.

There was nothing good about that plantation society except the land owners did indeed respect the blacks.  In many ways they were extended family.  They lived with us, they worked in the houses as well as out on the  land.  So they knew us as we knew them. Some of us grew up with them.

There are no family quarters for servants and employees any more.  The cabins were salvaged for the cypress wood.  They gradually disappeared and there is nothing left to remind us of the people or where they lived.  The old plantation commissary disappeared, as did the old mule lot went away.  Chicken coops are gone, hog lots are gone, no more milk cows either. Nothing left of that era at all, just the old Morrison family house and some modern day structures remain.

We do have one remnant, a black church on land given to them by the Morrison family years ago.  The church is still there.  I do not know if it is still active.  The last person I knew associated with the plantation and the church was Pete Carter.  Pete used to do yard work for my mother and at times asked and was given permission to use the yard equipment to clean up the church grounds.  Pete was an elderly man when I knew him.  I must have been ten or twelve years old when Pete came around to our house in New Roads on the banks of False River.

Pete was always a welcomed visitor.  Our cook and house cleaner was Ernestine Scott and she was born on Brunswick.  Ernestine worked for my mother until she died.  And truth be told my mother died not to many years after Ernestine.  Ernestine's nick name from Brunswick Plantation was Boll Weevil.  Never did we ever use that name as we all knew it was a sign of disrespect to her.  She may have been a servant but she was just as human as anyone else and deserved to be properly addressed.

So it remains to us to be a bastion of responsibility to those that were born or otherwise lived on the farms.  I fear that with passing time, relationships have disappeared.  A few selected ones may know or have been told their history but generally none of that is recorded.  So their family trees are clouded; they often refer to where they were born or grew up as their family history.   Some may have a vestige here or there and that perhaps is what Karen Galloway had.  Some regard those times as "Jin Crow" and want nothing to do with it.  I can not blame them.

Times are still hard on the blacks in New Roads.  Part is poor education, part is no jobs and part is crime.  It is a hard fight for them but some have risen to high stature in our society today.  General Honree, the hero of New Orleans after Katrina, is from our area. Pointe Coupe.  There are Catholic Bishops that are black and  are from our local black society.  We have seen other children become doctors and nurses, graduates of Louisiana State University and other prominent schools.  Yet extreme poverty continues and that brings with it distrust and civil unrest.   And it sows seeds of crime.

I wish I could say things are better now than in the old plantation society era but I am not so sure about that.

Cool Today . . .

It rained most of the night.  We were supposed to get an inch of rain, probably did so.  It started about 10:00 PM and dripped in to the morning at 5:30 AM.  Very humid outside too.  But the moisture is needed and it is holding down the temperature.  At least that is a relief.

We have gotten all the messages answered since we got back.  Good to be home again.  Never thought I would miss the place but I did.  I am getting to be a homebody.

Certainly disappointed LSU did not play Saturday night.  We were all set to watch on SEC TV which is a free thing for us DirecTV users.  It is an odd number channel but it works.  In this case it was split so it was on channel 611-1, sort of automatic after 611.  But alas the game was cancelled because of lightening and lateness.  Pity. I see where the athletic department at LSU is refunding the tickets for the people attending the game.  It will cost them a ton of money but that's the way it is.

On to Mississippi State.  I think Mississippi State will have a slight advantage because of the cancelled game.  Others think it is no advantage at all.  We will see.

Geaux Tigers!

Wow - Had to Reset Password . . .

I use a program, SlimCleaner, to clean out the cookies etc. and it wiped out my password to get into the application.

So I had to resort to regenerating a password.  It was not hard to do, just irritating thing to have to do.  But sometimes with a clean up you must do those kinds of things.  Done now.

Finished up my Central Hobbies Stik and am ready to go flying again.  It was not a hard task but I had to do a lot of little things I do not normally have to do.  I had to drill and fit an engine mount for my Magnum 0.91 cubic inch four stroke engine.  Not a big problem but some out of the ordinary I had to do.  Got it done but not after first putting a couple of coats on the fire wall to seal it up.   I supposedly had a coat but I ran a bit of sand paper over it, did the typical surface treatment with a mixture of alcohol and epoxy glue.  Not completely satisfied, I then put a coat of polyurethane varnish over it all.  Now it is sealed up.

I had to route the throttle servo push rod through the fire wall back to the servo.  Again, not hard to do, just something I had to do.  It is all set up now.

When I installed the fuel tank, I had to sort of back it up with some Styrofoam.  I have plenty of that from various packing sources like from the new Vacuum cleaner, or an new TV satellite receiver.  I save that stuff, cuts easy with a hobby knife and can be sanded smooth.  That is all in place with a pop cycle stick holding it in place. 

I had to mount the elevator and rudder servo in the aft fuselage to off set the weight of the engine.  In this case the model had provisions for that but as usual had to be reinforced.  I glued pop cycle sticks on the back side of the basic fuselage material.  A doubler of sorts but more to grip for the servo mount screws.

The fuselage was in to parts, the aft part had to be glued to the forward part.  It had four little braces to install, a bit difficult but got that job done.  I removed the installed tubes for the control rods as I was installing the servos in the aft part of the fuselage.

The provides control material was the hardest material I have ever dealt with on a model.  I have these "Z" bend pliers to make the bends necessary for the servo connections and had to use a table vice to close the pliers bending the rods.  As it was I broke one of them and had to result in soldering on clevis connectors on the ends of the rods.  But that too is done now. 

I stuck the battery that is used to power the receiver and the servos as far back in the open area of the fuselage as I could get it.  And I had to add a piece of balsa to mount an on off switch.  Got that all done.

Then the wing mount screws were just that metal screws.  I changed that to 1/4 inch nylon bolts as I am used to using in other planes.  I have lots of such bolts.  That required drilling out the holes through the wing and removing the blind nuts inside the fuselage.   I had replace the blind nuts with 1/4 inch ones for the nylon bolts.

On the wings I had to fiber glass a patch on the bottom of the wing over the joint.  The wings come in two pieces with a connect wooden board about 3/8ths thick.  One must epoxy the about 10 inch long piece into one side, the later into the other side joining the two pieces together.  As a normal practice, I put a fiber glass patch over that area with reinforces the structure considerable.

Last but not least I had to balance the airplane.  I found it came into balance almost perfectly, close enough that I did not have to add any weight to the front or the back.  One does that with no fuel in the tank, so when one takes off the airplane is nose heavy but the fuel burns down and the balance is maintained for landing.  During the flight normal control trim can accommodate the imbalance so that it is not a problem.

I put larger wheels than normal as I fly off a grass field.  Sometimes the grass is a little bit tall, the extra diameter wheels take care of that.  The landing gear is aluminum, pretty standard for this kind of airplane.  It is held on by two screws and that somewhat concerns me, all the others I have dealt with either had three or four such screws.  We shall see how it hold up.

I use Hitec radio equipment and found it to be quite adequate.  I have never had a problem with it.  I had all kinds of fits with Spectrum gear and got rid of it.  I use Hitec servos too but they are standard and work with anybody's equipment.

So tomorrow, I will go fly - again.  And I will continue to restore the UltraStik that ran into the electric fence will.  I was old and had a lot of problems to fix.  But surprisingly it came back together pretty goo, all though a bit heavier with fiber glass patches but stronger now.

Sad Day For Me . . .

Today, I resigned as Vice President of Walter Morrison Farm, Inc.  I had to do that onerous task.  I am in the midst of family fight. It is a sad day for me.

My family which owns Angeles Plantation (Walter Morrison Farm, Inc.).  On the plantation is located the old family house, or as I refer to it as Angeles House.  It was built in 1910 or there abouts, cypress, sits on raised piers and located on the front of the farm across the road from the Mississippi River levee.  My cousin, Chris lived there with the provisio that he would take care of the place.  Unfortunately the house had fallen into disrepair and we had to oust Chris for failing to do what was necessary to maintain the house.

So most of the family wants to sell the house and bit of land with it to relative, a descendant but not as yet a stockholder in the farm.  That really has little bearing on the issue, it is the selling of the land.  Selling the land is but the first step in eventual break up of the place.  Some other stockholder will want some more money and request something else to be sold and in time, it will break up.  Many of the old plantations along the Coast of Pointe Coupee have been broken up,  and sold off.  Some do not even have remnants of the old family home.  Our family has had possession of this place since 1856, or at least part of it. 

It is prime land for farming.  It is also prime land for industrial development.  It fronts directly on to the Mississippi River; it has major gas pipe lines through it, it has a major railroad through it, and it has a major state highway through it.  So it has unlimited water, gas, and transportation access from water, rail and trucking.  It is a jewel in the rough.

Yet the sale of just a little bit of our land to satisfy the sale of the family house is troubling.  One can not make deed restrictions to ensure the house to sold back.  Thus a hole is developed in the plantation where the house is owned by someone else.  I want to sell the house and give an 50 year lease to the family member buyer.  That was apparently not acceptable.  The powers to be are going ahead with the sale.

The family has a Usufructs Agreement regarding the use of the land fronting the Mississippi River.  The sale will abrogate the Usufructs Agreement.  That agreement is set to expire noon, May 28, 2020.  There is no written provision to prematurely end the agreement.  Yet the corporation ownership, deems if a 70% majority of the stockholders want to sell the house and land, it can do so.

Well we shall see what the courts have to say about that. And that is why I am no longer on the board of directors and saddened.