THE HISTORY OF V.A.R.M.S The Annual Diary 1990 - 2009

... and even more scale happenings ...
114
Bordertown 06
By Gary Mac
I arrived at Bordertown for my first ever visit to the place that I had heard so much about in my
short modelling career. I can now see why it is a great place to hold a scale meeting there, with all
the facilities, the clubhouse, hangars to store the models overnight and plenty of room to camp if
you want to, and even bunks to sleep in.
On arrival at lunch time on Friday there was a fairly strong wind blowing and it did not look like we
would be flying that day. There were a few people there all ready and every one was taking the
time to rig up all their models in the hope that the wind might die down later in the afternoon and
we would get a fly in. This was not to be, so we sat around chin wagging and sipping an ale or two
till it was time for dinner put on by the Gliding club members.
Saturday dawned with a beautiful blue sky and a very gentle breeze blowing and we were in for a
good days flying. It wasn’t long before the tugs had us up into the air and there were plenty of
thermals to catch. The first casualty of the day was Wayne Gordon’s ASW 22 which suddenly went
off the air and luckily it was in a nice thermal circle and started coming back to the strip instead of
heading for the road and landed in the paddocks and sustained a lot of damage. Theo was the next
one with his Minimoa losing a wing off the launch and sadly hitting a tree on the way down. John
Copeland was coming to land inverted and ran out of room when he tried to flip it right side up and
hit the deck in a cloud of dust. There were good thermals all day and everyone was able to stay up
for 10 to 20 minutes and sometimes longer for some. At one stage we had 6 tugs on the field so we
managed to get launched pretty efficiently.
Gary Whitfield from Mildura rocked up with his brand new tug, a Modeltech Piper Cub 1/3 scale
with a 3350mm wingspan running a 62cc Zenoah up front and weighing in at 13.5 kg. Gary took
no time in working out how to use his new tug and was soon launching us up like he had been
flying the Cub for years. Paul Clift had the blue tug which is now the yellow tug which is on its 3 rd
re-build, and had an 80cc twin Zenoah up front and 2.450mm wingspan. Paul managed to keep
flying all day in spite of taking a few hits from the glitches he was copping one area of the field.
Greg Potter had his tug out which was a Bowers Flybaby 1/3 scale with a 2800mm wingspan and a
62cc Zenoah up front. Chris Carpenter has his Wilga tug there and had a bit of trouble with his new
tuned pipe but got it going. Col Collyer has his Cub out on the line and also Bob McEwin with his
Hots runni9ng a Zenoah 62. I would like to say a big thank you to all the tug pilots for all their
work over the weekend as it was a great effort on their behalf.
Saturday nigh the members from the Gliding club put on a full lamb on the spit along with roast
pork and roast beef and roast vegetables and also sweets, which all went down rather well. The
presentations were held after dinner and the winners were as follows:
Modern Class
Vintage Class
1 – Col Collyer – Fox 1 – Michael Lui – Bergafaulke
2 – Chris Carpenter – ASH 26 2 – Tim Morland – Schweitzer 1-26
3 – Henryk Kobylanski – ASW 27 3 – Col Collyer – Golden Eagle
SCALE SOARING ASSOCIATION MODEL ENGINE’s AWARD
Greg Potter – 1/3 scale Fly-Baby tug
After the presentations Martin Simons gave us a talk on all the latest news and about some of the
new models from his trip to the World Championships in Europe.