Out There

My Pop was a fireworks fanatic.  Summer would arrive and with it, Pop would bring boxes of fireworks home.  There were lots of different sizes from little finger crackers to m80 bombs.  My favorite fireworks were the rockets.  Of the rockets, bottle rockets were my raw materials to build things.  Lots of things. I, of course, took bottle rockets apart.  Unrolling the paper of a bottle rocket revealed, the power source.  Black power and a fuze made of string drenched in black power made the assembly work.  Bottle rockets could be taped together in an assembly of three and a forth could be slid between the assembly.  By carefully building a fuse and rapping all four fuses together it was possible to build a two stage bottle rocket and yes, it flew many times!.

Just launching bottle rockets was one thing.  Combine this with a paper or balsa airplane and I had a very exciting sky climbing flaming beast.  I chased down the fire ball multiple times before I decided this was a bit more dangerous then I wanted to deal with.  Lighting the neighborhood up in flames was not a good idea.

Experimenting with paper planes, then balsa planes, balsa planes with elastic bands and propelers kept me busy for a couple of summers.  But the Holy Grail was that nitro powered plane in the green stamp book.

Green stamps.  Back when I was young (had to say that somewhere in this blog) grocery shopping at the Stop and Shop was much like today.  The part that was cool for kids was the checkout.  The cashier would punch in the price (there were no scanners) and at the end,  would take Pop’s or Mom’s money and give back some change and green stamps.  Somehow greenstamps were a prize for shopping at Stop and Shop.  Now, what do you do with green stamps?  Once a year, the green stamp company (who ever they were) would publish this glossy book of prizes you could get.  Each prize required some number of books or pages of green stamps that were collected when you went shopping.  Scattered around the Boston metro area were Green Stamp stores where you could go and claim your green stamp prize.

So, what does all this have to do with nitro airplanes?  Well for six books and three pages I could get this nitro powered .049 cu hand controlled airplane and really fly something!  With wet tongue and a draw full of loose green stamps I managed to fill the appropriate number of pages and walked up to the green stamp store to claim my airplane.

Now, Pop was not big with mechanics or fixing things and, well, I was.  So, I was on my own, something that, really, reflects how I have gone through life.  No mentor for model airplane flying, no friends to share experience with, just my own brain.

Nitro planes are a bit dangerous.  The fuel is very flammable and evaporates really fast.  The motor is a tiny single piston that runs in two cycles.  First cycle draws in some fuel, compresses the fuel, a glow plug (diesel style) explodes the fuel (keeping the glow plug hot) and the second cycle pushes the exhaust and compresses the air for the next cycle.  To get this engine started, I had to load fuel into the fuel tank with a tiny plastic hose, prime the engine by spinning the propeller (hitting the propeller blade with your index finger so it would spin) then, hooking a battery up to the glow plug to get the initial heat started.  Finally, you whack the propeller blade with your finger and if all goes well it starts up. (sometimes the motor would back fire and your finger would take the brunt of the force causing painful cuts).  With the plane engine  running and the blocks holding the plane I ran to the other end of the control lines, tugged on the plane to release the blocks and the plane picked up speed.  With deft control, I tipped the hand control up and the plane took off into the sky and promptly nose dived into the ground.

A week of repairs, glue, screws xacto blades and thinking about how to keep it from nose diving and I was in the air.  The first of many flights and many airplnes that kept me occuppied for many summer days.

From physics books to electricity.  Magnetism could move things at a distance.  The physics I was reading taught me that only metals and then just certian metals were magnetic.  But all metals could conduct electricity.  Electricity was a lot like magnetism.  They both had fields but electric fields were much less strong, or so it seemed.  Digging deeper into physics books I discovered how to move things at a distance with electricity.  This fellow, Ben Franklin, who just happened to be involved with the creation of our nation, seemed to have played around a lot with electricity.

The physics books talked about Pith balls.  The closest thing I could come up with was a ping pong ball which actually worked just fine.  By rubbing it on my clothes, I could get the cats hair to stand on end.  Finding a glass rod was a bit more difficult until Christmas came and I got a chemistry set which just happened to have a glass rod!  And so, I began experimenting with electricity.  Unlike magnetism,  Electricity seemed to effect metals and not metals.  I could take two aluminum foil strips, hang them off a wire, touch the glass rod to the wire and the foil strips would repel each other.  I could do the same thing with ping pong balls.  Back to the books to find out why.

My study of static electricity soon led to dc electricity.  Pictures of dry cells with screw tabs for wire connections and light bulbs and wire coils were learning’s that led to real ‘bread board’ experiments.  The library soon produced books on simple electric circuits and I was wiring up light bulbs, switches and batteries on a wooden board.   Then came the coil of wire around a metal bolt that I had screwed into the bread board.   I hook up the switch and battery and a real world magnet from electricity was born.  How cool was that.  Magnetism was so much stronger then static electricity and now I could make magnetism from electricity!

The simple circuits got more interesting when I hung an iron metal strip above the magnet.  By connecting the switch, I could make that metal strip touch the bolt head of the electromagnet.  The final phase of this experiment was to use the strip as a switch so that when there was no magnetism the swith would be on and when there was magnetism the switch would be off.  And so I made a buzzer, my first (but not my last) oscillator.

I do have to admit, as a grade school-er, having a little library to stop at when I walked home from school was very cool.  My library was  the Thomas Crane Public Library of Quincy.  It was the North Quincy, Atlantic street branch and was litter more then an old retail space on a brick blocked corner of Atlantic street.  It shared the building with a TV repair shop, a barber shop, a general store and a candy shop.  The candy shop was nice but I prefered the library.  I guess I just like brain candy better.

A short intro into the Dewey Decimal system and I was all set.  I zeroed in to the Science section and began my education into physics, astronomy, electricity and geology.

Physics and astronomy had the largest impact on my grade school years.  Astrophysics was most fascinating and when I got a telescope for my birthday I went on a nightly binge of trying to find planets in the sky.  Seeing a sphere other then the moon or the sun made me feel like I was part of something big, really big.    I wasn’t always looking up though.

Rocks always fascinated me.  Even today, I can’t resist finding an interesting rock in a place I’ve traveled and tucking it into my pocket.  In the physics and geology books I found pictures of crystals and was intrigued with the idea that there might be full grown crystals in some of the rocks that I collected.

My Pop had a work bench in the basement with a small sledge hammer and a vice.  All that I needed to try and crack rocks to find that elusive crystals.  Needless to say that vice got a work out but alas, I never found a big crystal.  I did find little ones and decided that until I happend upon the ‘right kind of rock’ I probably would not find the big crystals seen in the books at my library.