November 28, 2012

  • Wednesday 28th November 2012

    Wednesday Afternoon: Cold and blowing a gale. The weather has been awful for the last month, cold, wet and windy, with the exception of Sunday, which was calm clear and sunny and I was able to have a number of flights with my models. In fact the calm weather lasted most of Monday as well with the sky slowly clouding over, so I had a few more flights. Other than that it had been nearly a month since I flew a plane.

    My new model the Bixler, which is a foam glider powered by a pusher motor in a small pod and popular as a stable platfor for FPV - First Person View  - using small video cameras. I bought this to fly the HD Wingcam and have had a couple of goes over the weekend. The camera is mounted directly on the nose of the model with velcro, but there is a vibration issue, but once that is sorted out the results are OK (especially the raw video) I still have to find a way to make it appear better on you tube or what's the point of HD!

    Because it's been so horrible outside, I haven't been able to work on the Spanish street at all, except to repair the roof..... The wild cat got into the house and tried to jump out of the window using the Spanish building as a spring board, which caused the tiled roof to fall on the floor and severly damaging it and leaving nearly 100 tiles in need of replacement. Each tile had to be carefully cut from the underside of the next, then the replacements had to be painted to match and carfully reinserted. This is of course the opposite way to normal to assemble the roof and is very difficult to do, so it took ages. The roof is however now fully repaired.