Model Ariplanes and Me

 

Model airplanes

I will try to detail my experience with model airplanes.  In the far distant recesses of my memory, we lived in Missoula Montana.  I remember that we had some sort of a paper airplane and I seemed to remember that it was associated with cereal boxes.  I don't remember much about it except that it was a glider and not self-propelled.  We then moved to Pocatello and then on to Cheyenne, but I don't remember much about airplanes during that period of time.  When we got to Denver I remember three different kinds of airplanes. 

The first were paper airplanes that we made from a sheet of typing paper.  There were two different kinds one was a long sharp-nosed glider that we would fly off the porch of 433 Corona Street in Denver.  The other was what we called a fighter it was also made out of typing paper but had wider wings and a tail and a rather heavy nose.  This we would launch in a different manner by grabbing it by the nose and throwing it forcefully off the porch.  Neither one of these was very airworthy.

The next airplanes that I remember were, I think, associated with cereal boxes, but I don't remember if we just sent in the box top and got the airplane in the mail or whether it was cut out of the box.  These are represented World War II airplanes and required a penny to be glued into the nose for proper balance.  These were not self-propelled but were gliders and seemed to work well unless they crashed.

I then progressed to model airplanes that were propelled by a propeller and a rubber band.  These planes came in kits and had to be assembled.  They were made of balsa wood and the parts had to be cut out with a razor blade or other sharp object.  Because I was so interested in these planes I asked my parents for an X-Acto knife for Christmas.  It came with a number of different sharp blades much like the surgical scalpels that I became used to later in my medical training.  I would cut out the parts and glue them together which formed a skeleton structure of the airplane.  The kit came with a very thin paper, which would be glued to the framework with airplane glue.  The airplane glue that we used smelled like bananas and had a tendency to form a film if it got on your fingers.  This could be removed with a solvent, but we preferred to chew it off because solvent cost money.  Occasionally we would run out of airplane glue and would use sodium silicate.  You could buy a whole bunch of this at the drugstore, and it would last much longer than a tube of airplane glue.  The only problem was that sodium silicate was water-soluble.  In order to tighten up the paper that we use to cover the wings and fuselage we sprayed it with water.  It would shrink tightly and would make a good base for the paint that we used to cover the entire airplane.  We called this paint model airplane dope.  It came in various colors.

The only problem that we encountered was; if the plane was not balanced right when we flew it, the plane would veer to the ground and crash.  If the plane withstood the impact, we were lucky.  Sometimes we could salvage the plane so that we could make it airworthy to fly and crash again.

Many of the young men in our neighborhood in Denver built model airplanes and flew them.  Some of them even had gasoline engines.  I don't believe I ever had a model with a gasoline engine.  I did have a gasoline engine for a model airplane but never did install it in an airplane.

I do not remember ever having a picture of any of the models that I made.

Maybe you can find a kit and make a model airplane and outshine your grandpa.