Model Engine News: March 2013


Special Features:

   Upgrade Complete
   New Members' Free Plan: ML Midge
   3D Printer Follow-up
   Elfin 50 Redux
   Highly Addictive
   FAQ: What is a Permold?

Regular Features:

   Editorial
   New Books and Magazines This Month
   Engine Of The Month: ROC 049
   Tech Tip of the Month
   Briefly Noted
   Standard Stuff
Unless otherwise expressed, all original text, drawings, and photographs created by
Ronald A Chernich appearing on the Model Engine News web site are licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. 		Creative Commons License   

 

Editorial

February has been a short, rushed, and impossibly busy time for me. If all goes well, you might be reading this on March 1, which means I've managed to launch it from the tip of New Zealand's South Island. All this means I've had only two weeks to put the March issue together and get it ready so I can just "throw the switch" from the cruise ship. I've also had to put in two weeks of full-time work (plus nights and weekends, says Ruthie) to get V 0.2 Beta of Paper Miner ready for the testers who will have been pounding it while we've been off eating, drinking, and generally doing nothing much.

Lots of things have suffered as a result and if I've been slack responding to emails, so sorry—will try to do better next month, although we'll be away for part of that too! Not to mention, as soon as we get home on March 5, I have to start a two week course of radiotherapy for a tumor on my lower lumbar vertebrae which may, or may not, have been the cause of the back pain I suffered at the end of January. That, thankfully, has gone away, but some preventative maintenance on the old bod' seems like a good idea. All in all, this retirement lark is exhausting!

The few days away alluded to above is to celebrate my 66th birthday, so as tradition demands, MEN Members get a new Free Plan. As you'll read below, this is a plan I've wanted to make available to Members for years because it is such a nice little design. Easy to build and a pleasure to run. I hope to see a sudden increase in their numbers in the coming months.

Lastly, to those who supplied great material for me to include this month—including the answer to last month's Watzit, your stuff will appear, hopefully next month. I truly appreciate your contributions and feel guilty as hell that I could not include it all in the March issue. Speaking of which...

Upgrade Complete

I'm pleased to report that the Great Upgrade Project is done—you've no idea how pleased I am that project is done; hours and hours of mind bogglingly boring tedium, where a mistake due to lost concentration must later be found and corrected. Fortunately, I have tools to check and highlight such things, so my confidence (and testing) suggest it should all work just fine.

The update of the last thirty pages (June 2002 to December, 2005) rippled out, requiring changes in over 230 pages. I've been very careful that the changes don't break any links held external to Model Engine News (like Google docs and others). All Editorial pages have now been cross-linked by Next/Previous buttons to the right of all the "Standard Headings". If a next/previous page does not contain one of the standard sections, you'll end up at the Table of Contents, and suddenly I'm thinking I should have cross-linked those too! I might even do that, as my changes make an automated change to all pages practical, where it wasn't before.

I can also state that all Editorial pages are now 100% "Tidy", as regards HTML syntax. They have also been spell checked—a rather humbling process as I discovered that there were, ahem, some blind spots in my spelling ability, as well as a large number of genuine typos. The spelling has been adjusted to American standard, except where I'm quoting, or referencing a book title containing a word which is spelled differently in British/Australian English. For example, Tim Dannel's American Model Engine Encyclopedia, and the late Ron Moulton's The Model Aero Encyclopaedia.

So, glad it's done, and glad it's over!

New Members' Free Plan: ML Midge

Every March, because it's my birthday, I present MEN Members with another free plan for them to download. One I've wanted to place on this list for a long time is Mark Lubock's wonderful little Midge .8cc diesel. This has also been one of the most popular selling plan sets in the MBI range, so I've felt that it would not be right to suddenly offer something for free, that people have recently paid good money for—even if was only $15.

But seeing as sales have dwindled in recent years, it probably won't be breaking the faith to now add the Midge to the free plan list. Naturally, you have to be a MEN Member to access the download, but as those DVD sales are the way this web site's hosting costs get paid, I don't think anyone should have a problem with that. So, Members; trot over to the Members page and grab your Midge plan. It will also appear as an active link on the Plans page on your DVD, after you've applied this month's update.

3D Printer Follow-up

Recall that last month, we mentioned the amazing progress being made in 3D printers. Our little review missed what looks like "3D Central", a website dedicated to 3D printers and developments. I've added it to our Links page, indexing it under non-commercial (because its purpose is to inform, not sell), and commercial because it links out to an astounding number of commercial 3D printers. I'd like their comparison table even more if it gave layer thickness as well as print volume as the former seems more important to me than the latter. Again I say, if this is not model engineering, I don't know what is.

There are places in a miniature IC engine where plastics are quite appropriate, think about complex venturi inserts and throttle bodies for instance. I've not searched, but feel confident that "printable" plastics able to take the heat exist. I've just had to machine a peripherally ported venturi insert for a team race engine. Took me an hour, and the next one will take just as long. I could model it in 3D in maybe 15 minutes, with a far better throat contour, and print them like sausages, with different throat diameters. I'd still be drilling the #70 holes manually, I think, but it all seems practical. The question hanging in the back of my mind is how accurate the printed diameters would be, as a firm, close fit of the venturi body into the crankcase is essential. Still it could be printed oversize and turned to size in the lathe.

Incidentally, while attending a TROVE API Workshop at the Queensland State Library complex, I noticed a little 3D printer in their "Edge" public computer lab. When I've a moment free, I'll be following up on that one, for sure!

Elfin 50 Redux

The delightful and sought-after Elfin 50 was the subject of one of the first Adrian Duncan reviews we published. Well time passes and knowledge grows (hopefully), the old Elfin 50 review being a case in point. The only real fix was a complete replacement article, so that's what we've done, adding more detail on models and some on Frank Ellis and Aerol Engineering. This overlaps somewhat with the information contained in the Elfin Ball Race Models page, but the two are cross-linked, so no harm done, we hope!

Highly Addictive

The project which brought me out of retirement (temporarily), is a wrapper around a service called TROVE. The NLA (National Library of Australia—think LoC) has gained access to digital images of nearly all newspapers published in Australia up to 1953, when copyright put the kybosh on things. These have been passed through an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process and indexed so you can search them. OCR is notorious for making errors ('o' for 'e', for instance) so the quality of the data is not great, but in a move of genius, the NLA has opened the data so ANYONE can make corrections to the base data! In effect, they have recruited tens of thousands of unpaid editorial staff, and through this "crowd-sourced" army, are improving the quality of the data, daily.

TROVE contains no geospatial data, so enter Paper Miner, the project I've been recruited to build. This does data mining to extract place names from the base data and matches them to latitude and longitude values so the "hits" of a TROVE user's query can be mapped. A timeline uses color coding to indicate when in time the hits cluster. Our heading image shows an example of a search for "model+aeroplano" (sic). The search returned a mere 56 hits where the OCR process has changed "aeroplane" into "aeroplano". A search on the correct spelling currently finds 8244 newspaper articles. A button in the Raw Data view allows you to edit a record (in TROVE itself) and I am here to tell you, this is highly addictive—there used to be 66 instances of the mistake. I've found all the references to model aircraft in early Australian newspapers to be most interesting. Strangely, public interest in model aeroplanes, as expressed by the number of articles appearing in newspapers, peaked in 1933.

The intended audience for Paper Miner is historians, undergrads, amateur genealogists, and perhaps eventually, school students. At the moment, we are at version 0.2 Beta, so a lot of the intended functionality is not yet available. There is a paperminer.org.au domain, but the application will not be loaded there until we reach version 1.0. However, if you've an urge to have a look, this link will take you to the development site. You need to register and that requires a TROVE key. We are using the ability to figure out how to get such a key as a test for aspiring users .

FAQ: What is a Permold?

During the past month one of our group posed a question regarding the difference between a die casting and a permold casting. Was "permold" a purely American term for a die casting, or was there some actual difference? We Motor Boys are a lucky group in that while our knowledge may overlap in a small area, it extends hugely outside that overlap so that generally, someone will know the answer to just about anything. On the "permold" question, it was David Owen (of Owen Engines Australia) who supplied chapter and verse. David's response was so informative, I asked him to expand it a bit so it could become part of our Frequently Asked Questions page. So click the picture to go direct to the permold description.

New Books and Magazines This Month

Our subject this month follows on from the Harry Hawker biography reviewed last month, and by connection, the Sopwith biography, reviewed in the May 2012 issue. It is The Great Atlantic Air Race, by Percy Rowe, Angus & Robertson, UK, 1977, ISBN 0207957665. The book was found on a campus faire table for the princely sum of $7 some years ago. It is hardback, with 244 pages and a section of black and white photographic plates. If you go looking, be sure to do it by author. There are at least two other books with precisely the same name, but by different authors, and several others which include this book's title as part of theirs. Better still, search on the ISBN!

The "cast" is a 1920's Who's Who of Aviation, including Santos-Dumont, Glenn Curtis, Harry Hawker, Jack Alcock, Teddy Whitten-Brown, etc, etc. It covers the contestants for the Daily Mail £10,000 prize, as well as non-contestants, such as the crews of the four US Navy Nancy flying boats who made the first successful crossing, but who were ineligible, and the British R-34 airship which made the crossing in the reverse direction, one month after Alcock and Brown terminated the first successful crossing in an Irish bog.

The books is impossible to précis and still do it justice. I was keenly interested to see what author Rowe had to say regarding any reason for the overheating engine which put Hawker and Grieve in the drink. He gives it little notice, saying that contamination in the water coolant system may have been to blame. He does however say that Hawker's first person account was ghost written, and that some parts of it are unbelievable. He does cover Hawker's return to the UK well, making it easy to see why his name became a household word there.

In the same vein, he also discounts the story of Brown's famous wing walk during the crossing to chip ice from the engine air intakes, saying that the Vintage Aircraft Association tried to duplicate the effort at Brooklands, using the replica Vickers Vimy, built to re-enact the flight on its fiftieth anniversary. The test was conducted on the ground, with the engines throttled up. Their tester was unable to stay on the wing for more than a few seconds, even though he was holding onto a strut with both hands.

After covering the early careers of the participants in the race, and several who had influence on them, Row describes the attempts made by all (some twice). This becomes a bit confused as he chops between them in some cases, while abandoning chronology and following the pre, during, and post events in others. The book concludes with "whatever happened to" chapters. Regarding Hawker's demise, of which we mentioned the two conflicting versions last month, he adds a third theory: suicide! No mention is made of the official accident report of which Rowe, writing in 1977, may have been unaware owing to its fifty year secrecy restriction. The British pilots and navigators don't fare all that well, while the commanders and crews of the Nancy flying boats go on to distinguished naval careers with one being the Admiral commanding the USS Hornet when Doolittle led a flight of B-25's from its decks for the historical raid on Tokyo during World War II.

As a book helping to join up even more of the little dots, The Great Atlantic Air Race is a success. I just wish it was a little more, err, readable! As usual, Amazon book sellers have copies available at reasonable and just plain silly prices. ABE Books show literally dozens of copies available at even less than I paid for mine. Content, five. Presentation, three. Net result, four stars .

Engine Of The Month: ROC 049

Hot on the heals of the little known ROC 29, we have the even less known ROC 049. According to no less an authority than Peter Chinn, this little 1/2-A engine was the first such Japanese engine to reach the market. In his review of the engine, Adrian compares it to its contemporary, the Fuji, and OK Cub .049's of 1950 vintage. We will discover that the Fuji lags behind the others at peak rpm, with the OK Cub showing the best overall performance, although the margin between it and the ROC is not great. Never the less, the engine is rare and virtually unknown today. So, to paraphrase Jack Nicholson in the movie Pritzi's Honor from the Richard Condon book of the same name, if the ROC was so *'kin great, how come it's so *'kin dead? We are betting on relative company size (see The Fuji Story and you'll get the picture).

Tech Tip of the Month

While testing the next/previous links feature, I was curious as to what the first official Tech Tip had been. It was a good one: How To Machine Crankcases, from October, 2003. Guess What? it did not appear in the list of How To's! This has been corrected as the process is absolutely fundamental to model IC engine building, and easy too, once you know how. The information is also present in one form or another in just about every build article on this web site. But if you are new to all this, click the thumbnail, or link to get the good oil and find out what tooling you really, really need.

Briefly Noted

This section is intended to alert you to little things that are hard to expand to a full news item, or cunningly wind into the Editorial, but are worthy of note never the less.

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