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In memoriam for Bernie.. the Sting 21 chuckie he never built

Bernie's Sting 21 chuckie kit was sitting sadly on BVW's table at Bushfield one Sunday and I could not resist dropping a few quid to have a go at building it. The plan said 40gm RTF and I am far too old to heave a model of this weight into the air using a javelin chuck. It was also obvious that a legal 2gm of rubber would give a dismal catapult launch and so the Sting was built as a FF dlg with a left climb and right glide. A small underfin was added to give some control to the adverse yaw of this launch method.

I am not a great fan of break back fuselages so I used a split horizontal stab as a DT method driven off the viscous timer that Bernie bought from FliteHook (in 2002). The receipt told me that Bernie also bought a 5gm carbon boom for the Sting but this was not present as it had been used elsewhere. I found a length of E36 boom in the depths of the workshop which was used to fabricate the fuselage.

I will have a bash at trimming it out Tuesday and it occurs to me that we might enter it at the next Club Competition with a team of 3 each having a launch as proxy for a posthumous Bernie. I am fairly sure that he would approve of this…

Ian Middlemiss        April 15th 2016