In this Episode Matt and Joe talk about their journey in the hobby and discuss Where to Shop for the Hobby Supplies, and honored to be able to sit down with Hayes Hobby House owner, Alan Hayes Matt’s local Hobby store in Fayetteville, NC.
Introduction: 00:49
Flying Stories: 01:32
Bench Work: 54:00
Main Topic – Parts Shopping: 1:07:30
Interview with Alan Hayes: 1:33:23
Final Thoughts: 1:59:00
Show Resource Links:
Build:
FTFC20 Buildruary Build Challenge
FTFC20 April Showers Build Challenge
US stores: (customer service, stateside, and low wait time on parts
https://www.racedayquads.com
https://www.getfpv.com
https://www.motionrc.com ARF -PNP
https://www.amainhobbies.com /
Chinese direct – little to no or poor customer service typically. If a part is faulty, expect to eat it.
https://www.aliexpress.com/ many sellers,
www.banggood.com – good selection of parts,
Interview:
Hayes Hobby House
Eutaw Village North
809 Elm Street
Fayetteville, NC 28303-4151
(910) 485-2337
Feedback:
Join us on Discord!
Email us @ AviationRCNoob@gmail.com,
Say Hi on our Facebook Page
Tell us how we’re doing – FliteTest Forums Show Page
Music: http://www.purple-planet.com
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Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/avaitionrcnoob/message
TRANSCRIPTION:
That’s right. Blue sky isn’t flying well that was terrible. Let’s see. We need to at least it was better than just maniac laughter. Fly well. Fly well. You can do it. You got those guys. Welcome back to the aviation RC News Podcast. You found us. My name is Matt. And I’m Joe. We’re here to be with you in your adventure to RC Airborne for businesses. So buckle in, let’s take off. Okay, so, Matt, you it’s been a little over a week since we had a chance to meet up in person and fly some planes, and it’s been two or three weeks since we last recorded an episode together. Let’s start this episode off as we have the others, which is what have you been flying since last time? Okay, great. Thank you for apparently, I get very confused if it’s been more than a week. All right, let’s see. I flew the old Fogies that we built together. I took out my glider a bunch of times. I have a Volantex, a 28. It’s basically like an AR for almost ready to fly glider. It’s professionally built. It comes in a couple of pieces, you snap together and away it goes. It’s made out of, I think, EPDM foam or some high tech foam. It’s a great flyer. It’s awesome. If you want to try gliding, it’s a great way to start. It’s easy, and it’s a beautiful plane as it’s the end of January of 2020. It is also the end of one of the challenges on the Forum. And I had put my hat in for about twelve planes, and I had finished four of them as of about a week or so ago. So I got a moment to get out and fly the Mara. Other thing I called a flying mustache. I’ve had another plane that I built, designed for another friend of mine, and I managed to build before the contest was over, which is good. That’s called the luscombe silver. And that’s like a trainer plane, pretty much. It’s got a little bit of character. It’s got a lot of beautiful, gentle curves around the fuselage. And it has a unique wing, I would say, the way the flaps kind of come off of it. I have the Lincoln Sport, I think I talked about it last time, the buy plane from 1924. It was playing my friend’s great uncle had flown and he flew with Charles Lindbergh. I couldn’t remember who it was, but I was just listening to a different podcast with Lindbergh on it, a relative of his. And then I remembered her uncle flew with Lindbergh and he flew in this plane. He actually learned from Limburg and bought this plane, and he started his own flying field and all sorts of stuff after he owned this plane. So my goal was to try to build it and fly. I call it fly because it left the ground and it was sort of controlled, but as far as getting up and doing a circuit, it didn’t come anywhere close. Let’s see. The Mara is a beautiful glider, and I just need to figure out how to do my bungee launch a little bit better. I also tried to fly the Savoy Marquette, which is a boat plane from Italy in World War II. That is another one that probably made a better land skitter or land hover craft than it was an actual flyer. Never really left the ground except when I dumped it from my hand to the ground. Technically, that was in the air. That one crashed pretty bad. Tail section needs some work. I might be able to give it another try, and I’m hoping to get that to be successful. I really enjoyed that build, and I’ll probably try it again, even if I don’t get it off the ground. Also the bought o s two u d three. The third variation on that model, it’s the Kingfisher, and it’s one of those planes that you’ll oftentimes see on the back of US. Battleships. It’s a very gentle flyer. Unfortunately, I think mine was a little bit more tail heavy than I thought it was going to be. It left the ground. It was incredibly squarely. It didn’t help that it was pretty breezy. So every time the plane would pitch, it would over pitch from the wind. So basically, once it pitched a little bit too high, the wind would take it and just start shoving it around. And so that made it really hard to kind of get a handle on. Was it did I have it balanced right, or was it just the wind or what? Anyway, the second time I got it off the ground in that really kind of crazy squirrely way, when it came back down, the front end didn’t make it. So I’ve got to rebuild the front end and maybe build some reinforcements in there. But it taught me a lot about the design itself what’s strong, what isn’t. And so it’ll make the second version of the design a lot better. And I tried my bungee launch system out for the first time, which is awesome. That was a lot of fun. Tell me a little bit about this bungie launch, because I don’t think we’ve talked about that, even off the air. No, probably not. It’s kind of like some people build it. It’s really useful for they call high starts, which is if you have a glider and it’s a glider, so it doesn’t have any motor system to get it up. Let’s say you’re a single pilot. You can’t, like, fly a plane up of the air and then, like, quit, hit the fly, run it circles button, and then, like, release your glider that’s being towed behind it, and then somehow land the one plane while you’re gliding around like that. It just doesn’t work. So if you only buy yourself well, you can basically put all the lift in a bunch of launch and then shoot it into the sky couple hundred feet up. And then once it kind of reaches its altitude and it slows down a second, the launcher will kind of string will come off of the tow hook, and then you’re gliding and you’re already up there. And if you can catch a thermal, then you’re in business for a long while. So the Bungee launches a system to basically do a hands off launch just by yourself. Oftentimes people put it on like a foot pedal so they can launch it from standing behind the plane. That way they have both their hands on the controls while the thing skids across the ground until it gets speed to get up. All it is is basically surgical tubing with a crud ton of line behind it, maybe fishing line or I’m literally using just like, cotton thread from height string and then like a loop or two. One to kind of hook it up to something or wrap it around a sturdy pole. And then the other one to kind of just clip around the little toe hook thing with just like a metal literally a metal hook kind of angled out behind and down a little. And that way when it slows down, the little ring you put on it, like a key ring will just slide off. And then once you’re there, you’re in business. You have to take some pictures of that, possibly a video. Maybe once we get to a point where we can have more than 500 characters in our show description, we’ll be able to include some pictures to show folks what you’re talking about, because I’m still not fully visualizing it, but sure, you might have showed me the next time I go up. Okay, I will absolutely show you. It’s a neat little thing. If you watch the mara flying mustache video that I posted on YouTube, I think it’s on my personal channel. I still get to move everything over to the other channel. I have I’m using the Bungee launch on that, and I tried to video it as best I could. So if you want to, you can look there and I’ll send you a link to that. I know I’m not the only person who is flying. I know you and I got a chance to fly together, and I imagine you’ve probably flown a bunch since then. So tell me about it. Too right. So the last time we were talking, episode two, we were still in the process of building the fogeys. Got those, got those finished up largely. I still had to get the control wires hooked up to the control horns, which was his own difficulty because I’m out of the musical string that flight test likes to use and send out in their kits. So I don’t have it on me, but I just got some stiffer wire. It’s real soft, but it’s about the stiffness stuff I could get. Yeah, that’s like the Galvanized picture wire hanger stuff. Yeah, but it’s not that threaded stuff. It’s just a solid wire. Right, but it’s a solid version of the picture wire, if I recall right. That’s what it’s for originally, if you look for it in the hobby in the hardware store, that’s where you’re looking. Yeah, I mean, I got it out of the lows, so it does it one of the difficulties of working with that wire is just getting it straight because it’s just rolled around itself. But I’m having to make use of the coffee stirs to form a channel for those to go down. Otherwise they don’t have the strength to just straight up go from servo to the control horn. Yeah, that’s the longest length there, so it’s not going to buckle right. Or bend or anything. Even buckling aside, it’s got enough flex to it that I got to have the coffee stirs or small diameter straws to keep it from bowing. Otherwise it just like bows and I get no control. We finished up the old fogeys, and then, of course, Saturday did our dozens and dragons, and then Sunday, you and I headed out. We probably got out of there, what, 1030 by the time we got out to the field of fly. Yeah. Unfortunately, I kept somewhere with a couple of different planes, and I’m sorry, I feel like but they’re right here. I swear we can get them ready. So we five this, get this one done. That’s my fault. Anyway, so we did get out there. It’s about 1030. We did. And it’s had been raining that weekend again, or at least some foul weather within the last few days. So the wind was going again, which it was not nearly as bad as the first time when we took the Ft Delta out and tried flying, that when we built those together. The wind was a lot more manageable, possibly because the fogey was just better equipped to handle those wind conditions. Maybe. But the hard part about the wind conditions, that was driving me crazy, it would shift 90 degrees from itself, so it’d be coming from like, the northwest. And then in about the next five minutes, it’ll be going from the northwest or the northeast, and so north east, then go back to the northwest. So just as you set up your plane to go off in the wind, it would shift to go 90 degrees. So you got a cross brief now. So you’re trying to take off on a crossbreece. No matter what you tried to do, if you try to tilt your plane over, you’re like, oh, I just want to take off. I let you launch yours first. So I kind of see how it was going to fly because I hadn’t tried flying it yet. Right. I think if it was up to you, without any guide, you probably would have brought it up to like 30% throttle and tried to roll down the thing and then bring it up a little bit more again, like a simulator, like a real flight simulator. You’re not looking to just gonna go, you’re looking to like, ease yourself down the runway and take off. Right. And that’s great. Except on a crosspreece day with a tiny, light little plane, it’s going to take it and throw it around like a rag doll. So you just gun it to about 80% throttle or so and just let it go. It’ll take off. And once it’s kind of in the air, hopefully you get it high enough and you can kind of get it going where it needs to go. Otherwise it’s not going to have the right amount of oomph and that breeze is really going to just throw it around and probably into the ground if you’re not far up. Yeah, and there’s some things that I learned with that, especially when I was following the local that I’ll talk about in a minute. We started off and had the landing gear on both our planes, and I had tried to preemptively trim that plane out. Let’s talk about your landing gear for a minute. Okay. What new mistake did you make about your landing gear? First of all, I know you’re using the quarter, the 8th inch wire, which is really hard to bend wire. It helps if you have like, vise grips or a vise to put it in and kind of wrench it around and maybe a small hammer. Josh makes it look like it’s kind of easy, but on a couple of videos, you’ll notice he’s straining really hard to bend that stuff. Yeah. Tell me about your experience with the landing gear and trying to get that set up, because I think other noobs will have a similar problem. You would have to tell me what you think the noob mistake is because this is landing gear that I quickly knocked out for the glider. It was sturdy enough, it survived those crashes, and it’s still going. Now, I can tell you that my angles were not good. I was not using vice grips when I bent, when I was using a pair of pliers and I think a pair of needlenose to try to bend these angles. So the next time I go to make a landing year, I’m definitely going to go out in the garage where I’ve got a bench mounted vise that I can plan to do to work with. But yeah, the wheels, and I’m holding them now, one wheel sticks out farther forward than the other wheel does. One wheel is kind of twisted outward from the other wheel. And one wheel, like, one leg is slightly longer than the other. It was a hot. Messaging is not what I would call this Landmaker no. But you know what they work for? I don’t know. They look about right. It should be fine. And of course, you put it on your glider, right? Your glider took off in all of a half a foot, I think. Right. Glider was instantly off and around, so it didn’t matter. It was just a place to purchase. But like on a plane, where you got to get a little bit of distance going, it’s important that those wheels are symmetrical, that each side basically sits about the same height that they’re pointing not straight out, but just slightly toe in. Let me just I think it’s toe in. Yes, toe in. So that way, if you rock the one way, it slows the wheel that’s going ahead because it’s turned at an angle. Right. So the other one will be straight on, and the one that’s ahead will be turned. So they’ll slow back down, and you’ll kind of right the plane back to the direction you want to take off in. Toe in or toe out? Toe in. It’s toe in, and I foolishly might have told you toe out, so shame on me. But either way, it’s a little bit of toe in and definitely symmetrical. Symmetricals you can make it. And that’s where having these cutting boards with all the grids really pays off anyway. Okay, so you had landing gear, and you tried to make that work, and it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t working. It did seem bad. It rolled. It was fine. If we had been in a better environment for takeoff, the problems with this landing, it probably would have been more apparent. But with the amount of wind that we are catching, it, we’re doing our best take off into the wind, but like you say, every minute or so, the wind would shift directions. Right? We get it all set up, ready to go. We’re checking our controls, get blown away. It’s going from 90 degrees from where we set it up. Like, dang it. Yeah. Long story short, with landing gear, and it didn’t matter because you’ll find out why in a minute. The first launch, the first take off, the fogey went off. And like I said, I tried to pre trim this plane out visually. So it was like, okay, let me get this rudder in line. Let me get the elevator where I think it needs to be. And my trim was off, but my trim was way off to the point that as soon as it caught air, it just cut left and it started coming around. And I’m like, oh, that’s going right through the school and the power lines. Yeah, you got to do something about that. Joe. What? Joe. And at that point, you’re just like, okay, cut the throttle. And those situations, the best you’re hoping for is to just mitigate damage. It ended up no diving straight into the grass, which could have done more damage than it did. You lucked out. I mean, it landed perpendicular to your prop, was fine, and you said you only had one, so you lucked out so much. No, I had two props that day, and we’ll talk about that in a second, but I only had one backup. Okay, right. That’s what it was. Yeah, I only had one backup. And so when it first crashed, because it was cutting to the left real hard and of course with it turning and the wind catching it at every different angle as it was turning and it was the first time getting the phobia up in the air, I didn’t have a feel for the plane yet, so I was just trying to control damage on the landing. I wasn’t sure how far to move your sticks either to kind of get the right kind of control. Right. I know I ran into that when I got mine off the ground. We’ll talk about that in a second. Go ahead. We didn’t break the property. I didn’t break the prop. I think we had to finagle the landing gear just a little bit to get it back where it needs to be. And then we went to the impact also because I did not secure my battery. It’s sort of friction fit. It’s not going to move, I hope. There’s nowhere for the battery to really go. No, I was not far off. It did not go far, but it did punch out the front of the fogey, what would be the pilot’s windshield, and then the top of the nose area just bulged out because that battery just the impact shoved it almost clear to the firewall. So I knew I was going to have some repairs to do there, but pulled the battery back out, said, okay, well, I don’t have a way of secure because I didn’t have any Velcro to put in this thing. So let’s just put the battery back where it was. Hope I don’t crash again. And if I don’t crash again, then the battery is not going to shift around, really, unless I do some crazy stuff. You know where some of the best velcro to get for that kind of application? Where? Please? The Dollar store. Look at the dollar tree. They have velcro, and it’s not like super duper velcro. So you go to Lowe’s, you’ll get this Velcro that, man, you can get something from there. It comes in a big role, and it’s used for typically fabric applications and stuff. That’s pretty good, too. And I think it’s the same kind of stuff. But the dollar Tree, I noticed, has the exact same white hook loop stuff, and it’s not going to because the foam board isn’t that sturdy. You want stuff that will pull apart before it starts pulling the foam board apart. And so I found that the dollar tree stuff is exactly what you’re looking for. Don’t get the black stuff. The black stuff tends to be a harder pull and you’ll end up ripping the plane apart, typically before you get your battery out. That’s obviously counterproductive so you can go there. Yeah, I’ll keep that in mind because I know I ended up picking something up at Dollar General back in town, but I’ll check out Dollar Tree for it. So we got the battery put kind of back into position, checked out, rest playing, said, okay, let’s try again. Or at this point we had another failed little take off and we ended up taking the landing gear off and we went to hand chuck it or hand launch it. And I still don’t know why my controller started beeping or screaming. It’s like my controller locked up for some reason. So I’m not entirely sure what caused that. It was not low battery like we initially thought because I’ve had more flight time on it. Okay, it started acting weird, but turn the controller, I’ll turn it back on. We went to hand launch it and you say that way we could shift with the wind as it can. Right. So we went to hand launch it and I throw it up. You went to toss it and you were actually like nose up, Joe knows up. And I realized because I was trying, but I had no control over the elevator or rudder. I said I’ve got no control and immediately flipped my throttle kill switch. Upon your recommendation, I have a switch set up to regardless of where the throttle stick is positioned. When I flip that switch, it cuts the throttle with zero, which is like you say for safety when you’re handling the plane moving around, the controller doesn’t bump against your belly and throttle it up. And so cut it, it nose down into the ground from the 5ft up in the air. It was and that’s when we cracked the prop. That’s when we cracked the first prop. That’s right. Right. And so we ran up to it. I thought maybe I had a controller issue, but we took the wing off, had a look inside and it turned out in the first crash, and it’s going to be important. Check your electronics. In the first crash when the battery was thrown forward, which hey, the battery got thrown forward again in this crash. When the battery got thrown forward in the first crash, it had grabbed the receiver and pushed it forward as well, which they pulled out all of the servo controls, the rotor and elevator controls. So those servo leads have pulled out, so we had to get those stuck back in. Then I had control of the rotor and elevator again, so I had to run back to the car and get my spare prop and get it mounted up. I think you launched your fogey and fluid for a little bit during that time. Yeah. So before you hit launched, I think I had done my take off. And then in between that crash I just talked about when you got your propeller. I took a second go at flying around so the first time when I threw it. I took off from the ground. And again. It was that kind of like. Man. I don’t have enough time to get set up and ready to go before the wind shift. So I just gunned it and went. And of course, the old foe gets so much lift, it might as well have been a short takeoff in landing craft because it just went straight up into the air. But of course, it’s new. I haven’t figured out how touchy the controls were. I hadn’t set up any, like, the beginner, intermediate and advanced level like throws, so it’s 100% average way I went, so it wasn’t like I had reduced control. So everything was really touchy. And I’m sitting there watching it go, and of course, it’s really windy and the wind shifting. So I’m watching this plane just I’m trying to get at some elevation so I don’t crash it, or at least if it’s getting thrown around, I have time to kind of recover, as the recommendation is three accidents high. That’s how high you want it to be, which it’s about 100ft high, typically. So I’m sitting there just trying to get it up there, and it’s all over the place. And you saw it. It was like a squirrel was driving the thing. It was really frightening. I was like, oh, my God, it didn’t hit the ground. Oh, my God, where’s it going? Why is it rolling over there, pulling up on the elephant? And after a while, I’m like, okay, find controls. Matt fine. Controls. Bring it in. Bring it. Just a little bit touch here and a touch there because they have really big control surfaces. So a little bit of movement goes a long way on this plane, which is awesome. I mean, that’s really what you want. And so it kind of got under control if you have your throw reduction set up for it exactly right. And then the other half is if you’re not going so fast, the control surfaces don’t push it around so much. So I’m like, hey, idiot, back off a full throttle. You might be able to start controlling this thing. So after I kind of got it up in the air because I wanted to go fast enough to pull it, pull it, get some elevation. And once I had a kind of backed off the sticks and I’m like, oh, there it is. So, you know, I eased up on how much I was moving the sticks around as well as reduced the throttle so they weren’t as responsive. And then all of a sudden, I was like, oh, this is a beautiful plane. This flies so nice. It’s just cruising around. I’m like, let’s see, does it do a roll? And of course, it’s just three channels, so there’s no aerons. But I’m like, let’s do it. Let’s do a loop, and let’s see if we can do some sort of kind of weird corkscrew roll or something like that, and it was easy to do. And this plane was just and once we got up above the trees, the wind was at least consistent. That was kind of the key. Yeah. So after I kind of got up there and we kind of talked and learn a little bit about how the lay of the field was as far as wind and all that stuff, once I came down, I could give you a couple of pointers so that when you got up in the air, like you could actually get up there. Once you finally got that second go, you came back with the prop. After you came back with a prop, tell me what happened. I’m not sure exactly what you’re digging for, but we followed up and went again. And by this point, I had neutralized my trim because I definitely weighed on the trend trying to eyeball it in, but tossed it and it went great. The hand launch was great, especially once all my control services were working for a surprise. Yeah, the hand launch still scares me because in my mind, the ground launch, if it’s kind of weird, it’s kind of squirrel it’s on the ground. It’s not high enough to take a whole lot of damage. The hand launch scares me because if you launch it and it decides to nose down, it’s going to land on the nose. Don’t have your elevator controls backwards is all I can suggest. Well, I always check mine, but it went it caught air, low level flight. The first 20 or 30ft was rough a little. You see the wing, one wing, then the other wing goes up as it was getting hit by that ground noise in the air. But once it broke above the tree line height and got up into cleanish air, like you say, once you got up above the trees and the air was smoother, then it started flying beautifully. And I think you realized in that moment, that was the moment for me because that was the first one I’d had. Well, you could hear it in my voice. You could see it got up there. It was beautiful. It was awesome. It flew great even in those windy conditions. Once you got up above the tree line and the wind was easy to fly. Yes, the controls were great and I had the reduction set up on my controller, so it was actually easy for you to fly as opposed to with me, it’s like, oh, gosh, where’s it going? Yeah. And I was able to kind of play around with the trim a bit and get it the way I wanted. And you do have to watch. This way, if you just let it go for a while and you just haven’t followed it, it will get progressively higher and higher and higher on you. Yeah, we have a pretty far up there for a little bit. You could just. Cut the throttle kind of line for a long while because it just had so much lift on it, you could just hang out with it for a while. It was really cool for me to watch you just have that happy grin across your face as you’re watching you’re like, this is what it’s about. That’s why he loves it so much. This is it. I feel it. Oh, this is so good. I could see you just have that experience as me. And this is amazing because this is more than 5 seconds of flight. Yeah. Because up until now, that’s pretty much all you had. Yeah. I mean, the glider had more flight time than the Ft Delta the first couple of times I launched it, which it is definitely something I’ve learned. And I learned it with a fogey. Get it up there, get it away from the ground. So if something happens, you got room to maneuver, you got room to recover. Right. Yeah. The way the fogey is built and designed, if you run into a problem, just let it go. It will ride itself out. Yeah, it’s got the dihedral pretty strong. Actually. It’s not dihedral. The wing tips are kind of up as a dihedral and they really just bring it right. Let it go and it’ll come back even. It’s it’s self loading. And it did that well. So flew it around for a little while. Probably had five or six minutes flight time on that. But we were under a time crunch at that point, so we had to get it down. Just as I finished putting my glider together, I pulled out the Volantex A 28. At that point, as you were kind of flying your fogey around because I wanted you to see, like, this is our home built planes. Right. And let’s look at a professionally released plane. I just wanted you to kind of see what that looks like. Right. Plus, I love flying that plane. It’s a beautiful plane. So I put it together, and just as you had brought yours in now, what happened when you brought yours down? Because the landing wasn’t as smooth as we all hoped. No, which your landing was scary. Especially you were landing with a tailwind. My old fogey landing. Landing. I’ll talk about the glider landing. We’ll talk about that one in a minute. Your old fogey landing. You landed with a tailwind, which I was watching you. Really, Matthew? And you landed. I remember I looked over and said, Matthew, that was beautiful. Brought it right in. My landing from the good flight was it was shaping up okay. Yeah. I was bringing in nice lazy turns coming in, just bleeding off altitude, doing a little bit of a snake pattern, bringing it in. Then you got the turbulent air. Yeah, we got turbulent air. But the biggest problem was so we were out by the school and we were closer to the building than we normally would have been, but it was due to the direction of the headwind. So bringing it in on the last 30ft of altitude. I thought the plane was closer to me than it was. And it turns out it was further away from me that I thought it was. Which when it was approaching the school building and I was trying to bring it around. Have it come on this side of the building and turn into me. And then I could set it down near us. I realized at the last second that, no, that planes actually going to go, that’s, yes, I realize it’s still out there and I’m not going to turn it and get over to me, it’s going to end up going into the side of the school. So I killed the throttle and lost sight of it, and so immediately pulled back on the elevator, trying to keep it nose high to bleed off any excess speed and cushion landing. The problem, if I was doing an actual approach where I was closer to the ground, then yeah, you can kill a throttle, yank it back, it will lift that nose, bleed off speed and just kind of sat down on the ground and be okay. I’ve done that in my own flights. Local and the old folk would be able to do it too, because even without the gear, it handled it great. But not that time because it was too high off ground and I’d lost sight of it. So I wasn’t cushioning the impact. I think I nosed it up and it just nose up, stalled and then straight down and I broke the other prop. Yes, my flying was done until I could get some more props ordered in. And then real quick while we’re on the phone, then we’ll get back to your flyer. I did bring a home, got some props and flew it at my local park a couple of times. I went out to Saturday. Tell me about that, because you gave me a call in the middle of what I was doing and I heard what you were doing. But I had kids who were acting up and a bunch of other things going on and I only half heard what I heard was just pure joy, that’s what I heard. So I got out to the park and it chucked it and flew it. Long story short, I flew it and it flew great. It was windier than I would have liked it to be, which just seems to be the general case right now. But it flew great. I got trimmed out, it was flying nice. I was able to fly it around 50% throttle. Anything more than that, it was steady climbing, so they’re probably higher than I should have let it get. And I’d bring it on back down. So I’m flying on a three cell, 1300 milliamp hour battery, and I went through two of those batteries so that day Saturday. I got probably a full hour of flight time, which was great because having a good time flying it. People walking by. I hear some younger kids off in this electric play. They’re sitting there watching. They’re getting some joy out of it, too. And I found out that fog you will do backflips. So that was fun. It doesn’t look pretty good. It does look pretty good. And then brought it in. And then I actually flew it a bit today on the third battery had charged us. I get my batteries charged, but something happened today, and I’m not entirely sure how it happened. I know how to fix it, but all day today, I just could not get the rudder trimmed outright. And I definitely felt like it was nosing down constantly. Like I had the trim for the elevator trimmed all the way nose up, and it was still at three quarter throttle, wanting to more nose down than anything. And at three quarter throttle, that thing should have been 30 degrees up in the air. So I finally landed and had a look at it. And somehow even at full back trim on the elevator, the elevator surface, the elevator is angled downward, so it’s constantly pushing its nose down. So you had a flex of the control wires, the flexibility, the straightening of it, I’m not entirely sure. I didn’t think it had room to straighten out. But the control rod, that wire has changed. And what I’ve learned from that is I want to check that in the future because I check are my servos hooked up in the right channels and are they doing the right thing? I’m not looking to see when my sticks are zeroed out. Is my elevator zeroed out, right? Is it where it should be? Should be a foregone assumption. One thing is to get sicker while you could use it. Like I said, the landscaping wires literally go to Lowe’s or Home Depot or whatever big box store and ask them. Even like Ace Hardware. Probably hasn’t, too. Just ask them for their landscaping wire bundle and they’ll point you to just a bunch of metal sticks with little flags on them. And that wire is awesome. It’s springy. It’s thick enough to be resolved. You can almost get the full length without supporting it. And all you got to do to support it is just run a zip tie around the middle of it and glue the zip tie into the plane wherever that makes sense at the right distance. And that will fully support it enough for you, won’t have any issues. It’s a little heavy and it’s a little thicker than the music wire stuff. But I’ll tell you what, at $8 for 100 and they’re 22 inches long, you can’t beat that. No, that’s even cheaper than what I bought this wire for. I will probably be converting over to that. Just know it’s heavier. So the more you have it at the back end. The longer the stretch of that, you might want to put your service back further and reduce the length of that at that point and just put an extension wire for the actual lead right. Coming off the receiver, going to a servo. I found out that the elevator surface was just having a nose down constantly, so I wanted to go in there and kink that wire. And there’s a V bend technique. That flight test shows that if anybody that does rope knots is familiar with sheep shank, it’s a similar concept, just taking up some of that length. So I want to do some adjustments there. One of the other things I’ve seen is they take a nearly as pliers and a straight wire and just twist it 90 degrees or whatever direction you need just the one twist and kind of holding the other wires so they stay perpendicular or sorry, stay parallel to each other. And that essentially takes up that length, but it’s only one twist instead of two. And that’s easier to adjust with just a single wrench. So I’ve done that and that works too. So they’re both good mechanisms of shortening the length of the wire and allowing you to adjust it after you’ve got it set up. So if you notice, you’re always trimming a bit to the right, you can adjust the wire so you can bring it back to zero, right. And have it set up perfect every time. So, lesson to take away from that whole situation is check what your control services are doing at zero point. Exactly. Because again, I fought it this morning or this lunchtime. Yeah, I’m trying to fly it. It was just constantly nosing down, which I was still able to fly it, but it wasn’t flying ideal because of that. And it wasn’t a hands off joy as it was earlier, no, but it was another learning experience for me. So I didn’t mind too much of the frustration of what is actually happening. But looking at it, I was able to learn from it. Now, flying the fog is definitely reminded me of some flight principles that I knew a long time ago that I’d forgotten, which is because when it was all trend out, it was flying well, the wind wasn’t terrible, it flew great. And that’s when I remembered that when you trim it and you can get it trimmed to level flight at whatever throttle you’re setting it up, when you want to climb, you don’t have to pull that nose up, just increase your throttle just a little bit. Just because you’ve got a trend for level flight at that speed, when you go to add more throttle, you’re going to generate more lift, it’s going to nose up because you’re trimmed for a certain speed. So the plane will by nature, nose up just to try to bleed off that speed and will result in a climb and then if you want to bring it on back down slow and easy, you can pull off the throttle, it’ll start nosing down a little bit and descending. And so I was able to fly it up, fly it down, fly it up, fly it down, just by adjusting my throttle control, which actually, when I had it trimmed for 50 60% throttle, I got crazy flight time out of that three cell battery before the battery alert, where the battery alert started chirping. A lot learned in just a couple of flights with the fogey. And honestly, I’m wishing that I had listened to you on the front end when you say, hey, let’s build a fogey together. Because if I started with the fogey, I’d have been up in the air flying well, a lot sooner than you could jump headfirst into building your own thing and understood that kind of joy. I’m glad you did what you did. When I’m with you, I wanted to have just a plane that you could rely on. I mean, I’d never built an old fogey before we built it together, but again, I’ve been on the forums that I’ve heard a lot of people when people say, what plane should I buy? Or what plane should I build as my first build? And the answer tends to go to, like, three different planes. The old fogey is one, the tiny trainer is another. And I think the explorer the Ft explorer is another one. The Explorer is nice because it’s modular and it can kind of grow with you. You can keep adding channels to it easy. People like that one, too. And honestly, I can attest that all three of them are great flyers. They’re just great choices. So it depends on how big of a motor system you want to pull together and put in your plane. What do you have? Really? Anyway. Good. That’s good. I’m so excited because you’re calling me and I hear like, I flew it. It was awesome. This is so nice. I’ve spent a good 40 minutes just flying. I love this. I’m so glad. Thank you. This is great. And I’m sitting there going like, thank God. And I’m like, I wish I weren’t so distracted right now. But I can tell that what I was hoping for you was happening. And that made me so excited for you and so happy that this is something that we’re going to be doing for a while, you and I, just as a bunch of buddies, hanging out and flying when we get together. It’ll be good fun. Yeah. I’ve got a little repair work to do on it, but I think everybody does when they get done flying for the day. Well, it lands well. I would like it if it flew slower, but I think that’s the nature of I’ve got a three cell battery in there as opposed to a two cell. You can go pretty slow with that plane. You really can. You just probably haven’t bothered with it yet. But you can go awful slow with it, especially if you’ve got like the wind we had when we went out, really just turn it to the wind and slow the thing down. You’ll just have it like going nowhere but still being good. Speaking of that, let me quickly go over the Lancaster glider. That’s fine. I really just want to touch I brought it up into the air. It’s got a folding prop, so it’s just a glider. You bring it way up in the air, you get a high and you just turn off the motor and you just glide around and collapse back and forth, which was a lot of fun to do. It was almost like slope soaring way up, like 150ft up and kind of going back and forth and just kind of reading the wind and trying to see if you can get a little bit of speed and then the thing will do a loop or it’ll do a roll if you really get enough going for it. So it was good. And then I realized we need to bring it in. So I’m bringing it in, letting it lead off the elevation and I’m bringing it around and I’m realizing like, well, I’ve got to bring it around over the parking lot and stuff like that. I’m going to kind of bring it in kind of like with the tailwind. I’m going to turn it, you know, kind of turn it into the wind. I’ll slow it down and I’ll bring it across me and land right to left, which is kind of where the wind is coming from for the most part that day. Well, I bring it in over the parking lot, right? And then I’m like that’s kind of going over the fence. If I bring it too far down and something goes wrong, I’m going to shred the dickens out of the bottom of this plane. So let me bring it over the parking lot a little bit more. I’m like, oh God, this isn’t turning. I started to turn it, but it wasn’t turning like it was supposed to kind of come around. Yaw. For me it was to the right and come from the parking lot, which was on my right, across me, but it wasn’t turning at all, like at all. I’m like, did something happen with a servo? And I think it was a tailwind and it just wasn’t catching the air like I hoped and it was just getting pushed. So it started coming in with the parking lot hot and I’m like, oh no, this is coming real low. I mean, it’s going fast. Like I got enough speed where if I got to pull out or whatever, I could probably do it and I could kick on the motor and all that stuff at the time the motor was off. I’m coming, I’m going fast. So I kind of ditched a little left so that I can avoid going straight over the fence. And then I realize I’m going right for our cars, and it’s only like 10ft up, 20ft up. I’m like, oh, no. And of course, right above the cars is utilized. Going to the school like, oh, gosh, can’t go too high. Gotta avoid the wires, got to avoid the cars, got to avoid the fence. Oh, jeez. I’m like, well, maybe I can just zoom it down the entrance road and hope that I can get out of this. I’m like, I’m going to y’all left. I try to get in between the trees. We’re talking, like, four foot off the ground. Zooming between two trees to say that didn’t quite work out. But I didn’t hit the cars, I didn’t hit the utility lines, I didn’t hit the school, and I didn’t screw up the plane over top of the fence and shred it so I feel like I was successful. I have a thing that I’ll have to buff out a little bit with some hot water. Because that’s how when you crush foam. The best way to fix like. When you buy a foam plane. The best way to fix a crush is to put hot water back on it. And then that reexpans the foam and you’ll get it too close to even with the original surface anyway. I’m going to do that. And I think one of the things I got, like, a canopy, it was already a busted canopy, so I’m just going to replace the canopy like I was planning on anyway. Right, because you were aiming to go between the two trees, which kind of pitched up at the last second. Caught one lower branches. Yeah, and I caught a pretty square, too, because it made a pretty good dent. But yeah, if I hadn’t caught it, I might have been able to make it had I not caught that branch. But I knew that it was done for one way or the other, so I feel like I made out like a bandit, not hitting your car and causing all sorts of damage. Thank you. You’re welcome. Not busting one of the school windows or something like that by accident. I mean, I wasn’t as worried about that, and I was worried about taking out the utility lines or God knows what. I just realized, like, at the last minute, it was coming in hot. I’m like, oh, no. Oh, gosh, this is a terrible place to land. This is going to be no, it’s like, this isn’t going like I thought, where can I ditch it? Oh, no. There is no place. I wasn’t thinking this through. Oh, no. Another example of sometimes landings are just organized. Like, just manage chaos. Yeah, I think so. The thing is, I’ve flown this plane a ton, generally, I know how it goes. I was really surprised that it didn’t come around, because it’s very responsive, typically, anyway. I wanted to share that story because sometimes it’s just that’s the way that brings up something that I was kind of getting a feel for with the fogey. Which I don’t know if it necessarily applies in this situation. But I noticed with the fogey. When I cut the throttle completely. Especially when it was up in altitude. When I cut the throttle completely. Yes. It could still nose down and go. But it would definitely lose a lot of its speed. It would just kind of start descending, but the controls became a lot less responsive. And especially with the fog, I found out that if I wanted to just kind of let it go lazily and I wasn’t worried about having real strong control of it, that I was kind of sluggish and responding to what I was telling to do, I could have throttled down and be okay. But if I needed to control, if I need to get some better reaction times and better response from the plane, then I need to give it some Thrall 20% 30%. It makes sense when you think about it, but it’s that rotor wash the wind also. Yeah, prop wash. My apologies, but that thrust being blown back by the prop coming across those control surfaces just forces those surfaces to be more responsive. And I wonder if maybe you weren’t experiencing some of that, especially considering you were flying with a tailwind. That could have been. It definitely could have been. Well, good. So next we got the flights out of the way. We want to talk about what we’re building right now. We’ll start with you, Matthew, because you’ve got a forum challenge going on right now. So let’s talk about what you’re building. I do. I have a forum challenge called Builderry, and that’s basically built four planes in the four weeks in February. So it’s kind of madcap, but at the same point, it’s more that life gets in the way. That makes it mad cap because flights, planes are just so easy to put together. So I’ve got a list of a couple plans, planes I plan on building. One of them is the Ft arrow. I’m going to skin it. It’s the first time I’ve actually taken the paper off of one side and I’m going to put like a printed picture skin so that when it’s done being built, it’s going to have a really cool design. So that’s the first time I’m going to try that. Then I’m going to build the Mo or the mev or whatever. If you’ve ever seen the anime now, The Valley of the Wind, which I’m sure a lot of you haven’t, there’s an animator from Japan called Hayo Mizaki, and he made a lot of really amazing films. His dad was, I think, an airline designer for Japan. And he always just has aircraft in all of his movies. And he pays special attention to detail as to like, is this even possible right so when you look at these things, they’re like impossibly big, but boy, they look really realistic as they’re kind of lumbering through the imagined animation, right? So you look at these things and I’m like, this is so cool. One of these things is the one main character flies a glider, and it’s just this beautiful kind of bentknuckle gold wing glider. It has like a jet engine, kind of like a ducted fan, but it’s a jet. And it’s just beautiful. It’s really peaceful to watch. And then she just kind of in this harness, almost like a traditional glider would be, where you have the little triangle and you’re kind of suspended in it. So she’s suspended on top of this glider. It’s jet powered, and she’s just kind of gliding across, quiet and peaceful and serene, and it’s really neat. Somebody on the forum on the flight test made an article about one he built because he’s equally inspired, like I am, about this whole thing. So I’m putting one of those together. And then Flight Test has P 38, which I’ve been eyeballing like crazy. I got the kit from my local hobby store because they’re selling flight test kits now. And I think I have an Ft courser kit somewhere upstairs for the Master series. If not, I might actually end up rebuilding my Burgesstone wing from the challenge the previous month and do a build video with it as I build to show other people how to build it because it’s a lot of fun. I need to have one on hand. It’s just a fun flyer. So I’m going to do those for and also kind of probably I may not build the arrow because I’ve already built this. I’m going to show Joe right now. But I’ve built this little plane. It’s called the 1938 Aviation Model Special, and it’s basically this little traditional jet looking plank plane. The wing is a straight, flat surface, traditional, kind of swept, wing like airliner wing, right? And it looks almost like the Delta wing foil. Yeah, except like kind of shrunk down or truncated and put forward. And it’s got a little tail section. And all it is, is just a little tiny F pack motor. And I’ll tell you what, I built it in and out Fpack. So that’s 18 622, 80 KV motor. It’s what flight test sells as their F pack. I think it’s got a 1212 amp ESC. I literally just put two servos on it. It just has an elevator and an Aylon. So it’s a three channel plane, but not a traditional one. The traditional one has a rudder and an elevator. But what you want to do is this thing, it flies like it’s on rails, literally let go. And it just went straight and just kept going straight until I touched the surface. And I’ll tell you what, it went incredibly fast. Like, it went fast and it was really responsive and I wasn’t really sure what the heck to do with it. I wasn’t ready for that at first, but it spins accurately. I mean, I rotated it and it just kept going like an arrow. It just was rotating like crazy, rolling across the fuselage, basically. It was awesome. Again, hour and 15 minutes from literally from plans and a piece of foam board to ready to fly. Literally everything in there. All the servos in the control rods hooked up, the actual control horns in there, everything cut out, whatever. The only thing I don’t have on here is anything to make it look pretty. It’s perfect. I can’t suggest it enough so it’s vimana 89. On the flight test forms, he submitted a resource with his hand drawn drawings. I’m helping him put together some digital versions of these things. This thing is awesome. I’m so glad I built one. It’s almost like building old fog, except this is like if you want some speed and agility and do some stuff with it, build this thing, you won’t regret it. It’s only one sheet of foam board, so outside of the actual PowerPod, it’ll cost almost nothing. And then the other half of what I’m building is on the forums. I didn’t quite get to it, but I was finishing out my Spruce Gosling, which is Howard Hughes Spruce Goose, but shrunk down 175 scale. Because it’s a giant plane, it’s still four and a half feet on my table. And it’s got eight really tiny quad motors, 14, eight super. So it’s basically like the little toothpick quads, if you know what they look like. They’re like we’re talking like three inch or two inch prop size motors, and it’s got eight of them. So I’m curious to see how it does. I’m still working on that. So those are the things I’m building. What about you, Joe? What are you planning on building? I know you’ve got your Old Fogey is going to get repaired, right? The old fogey definitely needs some repairs. And largely with that is I want to do a little bit of shoring up on the front, where it’s hitting the ground a couple of times, which might just be putting another piece of foam in there on either side just to reinforce that a little bit. I do see where because I’m getting some use out of it, the wing where the rubber band is going over is kind of boogering up a bit. And I do have the Popsicle stick laid over the front and the back of the wing. But I’m thinking I might go and put a Popsicle stick underneath those surfaces. Basically underneath the previous or the existing Popsicle sticks. The underside of the wing. It probably leaves those stick out just a little bit. Just so that the rubber bands not up against the foam. Because I’m putting those rubber bands on and taking them off quite a bit now that I’m actually getting some good flight. And so. I want to preserve that wing as long as I can. You did send down the Simple Soar plans a couple of visits ago, so I am wanting to make a crack at the simple store so that I can get the kick that I was looking for in the glider that I was building. I can’t recommend it enough. I think it’s a beautiful plane. We’ll talk about suggestions when you get to start building it. There are some things that will make it a better experience, but it’s an amazing plane. No matter which way you shake it, even if you build it just like they have it and don’t do anything different, you’re going to have a good time with it. And it may be that when I built it, I go ahead and build the unpowered nose cone section so that we could do a toe launch on it. Let you drag me up some time. Yeah, with the Spruce Goose, if I ever get that done. Do you see it? I’m showing it to him on our discord feed here. Yeah, I’m looking at it on your screen now. Got a lot of motors on it. It’s ridiculous. I can’t wait to fly it. Hopefully I don’t crash it. We’ll see a lot of work gone. If you do whatever, that’s the way of it. It was a good experience, too. It’s just a big, giant set of octopus wires all inside of it. I’ve got to straighten out, and then I think I’m ready to give it a try. Because you got to imagine eight wires hooked up to eight motor, hooked up to ESC, hooked up to a power distribution board, those distribution boards coming together with one to one motor. And then, of course, they’ve got a bunch of signal wires that have got to get to the receiver. And of course, they’re all pairing down from eight to, I think, three channels, ultimately, because I want to have a left and a right and a General Center. So I want General Throttle to be all of them. And then a little bit of left or a little bit of right to have it, y’all, because there’s enough motors. There should be. And I’m kind of reserving the two in the center. I have two ESCs that have failed me. I don’t know why they’re not working, but they’re not. So I put those two motors in the center, and those happen to be actually motors with pusher props on them. They’re basically I switched the props on them so the pushing. So if I ever get those working, those are going to be basically like a slider. And I’m going to have those reverse prop so they’ll be my break. So when I throttle down, I’ll turn that up as a air brake, basically. Okay, we’ll see if that makes a difference or whatever. Right now, they just don’t function. But I’m certain after doing the motor test on it, that six motors is going to be more than enough to launch this puppy into the air. I don’t care what battery I’ve got on it. It’s going to go. I had that many motors in its real world build because it was carrying stuff. So, yeah, motors that you got on there is going to be way overkill. And these things are like, crazy. It’s just crazy. Anyway, I won’t even get into it. I could go on for about 10 hours on that. It’s not worth that. Nobody’s that interested in except me, I think. Why don’t we talk about our major topic? Right. We have a topic. We weren’t here just to talk about airplanes. Oh, wait, we are. Yeah. So two things before we get into the major topic, one of which I really meant to put on the front end of this episode and just talking to our listeners, I appreciate the patience that those that are listening have, whether they notice it or not. I’m doing sound work for this podcast, and there’s some audio issues that I’ve not been fully satisfied with. So every episode probably sounds a little different as I’m trying to figure out different methods for getting the best sound possible. And hopefully every episode is getting a little better on that front. But if you’ve heard some things, there are some things in the sound quality chance are. I’m aware. I’m trying to take care of those. Just bear with us as we try to figure out how to do this the best way we know how. That’s right. And something else I didn’t say on the front end. I’ll go ahead and say it now. We’re going to talk about our main topic, which is where to get all the stuff for getting into this hobby. But at the tail end of this episode, matthew, you’ve lined up to talk to somebody. We’re going to have that audio attached to the tail end of this episode. Exactly. They look forward to that. Excellent. Yeah. I’m going to talk to our local hobby store guy, alan Hayes of Hayes Hobby House here in Fayetteville, North Carolina. They’ve been in business. His daddy owned the store. He ended up taking it over for him, and he’s been running it since. And they are just the go to people. They’re great. I can’t talk about them enough, but they’re really great people to go to when you need, you know, if you want to ask, like, what the heck is going on with this thing? And he’ll sit down with you and try to troubleshoot it with you, figure it out. If you buy a plane from, he’ll help you set it up. Heck, he’ll set it up for you. Some guys just like, I just want to fly the thing. You get it ready, and I’ll just show up and get it. It’s like, okay, man, if that’s what we need. I’m sure he’s probably charging for some of that service but that’s fine. That’s what these guys need and that’s what they want. So he’s here to help anybody kind of get into the hobby, whether it be I call it it’s a modern, traditional hobby store, and we’ll kind of get into what that exactly means. But to me, the old, old hobby stores are just where there’s stuff put every which way and it doesn’t look organized. The owner probably knows about it. He’s like, oh, I remember 30 years ago we bought that kid. It’s way in the back. I’m not changing the price though. Just like this is a vintage kid at this point. Maybe it went up in value, but either way, they’re kind of squirrel holes and it’s tough to really find anything if you’re not the owner and they barely know what inventory they have and that kind of stuff. That to me, that’s the way traditional style like these guys are the ones I kind of grew up. They’ve got a very organized store. They’ve got cubby holes for everything because the hobby store has so many different parts and pieces. Any of these hobbies need a ton of different things. And of course, he’s got plastic modeling, so he’s got a ton of plastic model kits. He’s got quadcopters. He deals with obviously, airplanes. He deals with all the different scales of RC cars. And we’re talking not just electric, but electric nitro gas, even traditional just wind up rubber band stuff. And he’s also got model trains. There’s a whole model train society in town. And so he helps kind of supply that need in that niche for our town, for our city. And so it’s traditional stuff. And I think even boats and rockets and stuff, he covers it all. And so if you need something and they’ve got 30, 40, 50 years of experience kind of tucked in to all the different people that work there. And if you need to know anything, they’re somewhere, they’re the best place to start. Because if they don’t know, they know people who do. So that’s my local store. I guess that kind of kicks off the local store thing when you’re asking where do we get our stuff right now you’re getting into it, right? Right. Because I had broken all my props and so I had to get somewhere. And I don’t have a place here in my town that sells them. And I looked at the next town over that’s a lot bigger and a lot more stuff to it. It is the capital, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s Columbia, South Carolina. It’s the capital. So I looked in there and there were some hobby shops, but they were closed on the day that I was looking down in the area. I ended up having to go online to Amazon to order the parts. But where all online can we look to buy these parts? Because I know the flight test store and I also know I can go through Amazon. But if folks are looking for other alternatives, what else is out there on the Internet? And I guess you can talk about the local shops, but that’s going to be sort of city dependent. Sure, yeah. Where can folks go to find their parts and supplies? Okay, well, I’m going to cover a couple I could go through the topic types. Right. So we’ve got local stores and that’s face to face having a conversation with somebody and who can look at what problems you have physically look at. You can bring your stuff in and they will sit down with you and try to help you figure it out because they’re like you. They love the hobby. They want you to have a great experience, whether it be from their product or just in general because they know if you’re into the hobby, eventually you’ll come in and buy stuff from them because if you love the hobby, you’ll be buying something. And they’re a great resource. I’ll get into that. Then there’s us. Stores. So these are basically online stores that are in the United States, and they may be in Florida or California or wherever they might be around your corner. But like most of us, it’s not going to be. But they’re great resources too, and they have great customer service. And we’ll get into that a little bit more detail. Then there’s Chinese places, basically Chinese stores with us. Warehouses. There’s a couple of big companies that have I mean, they sell a lot of great parts and pieces and they’re a great resource to start with. And they have a US warehouse, which means that they ship pretty quick. And then there are ones that are just trying to direct where you just go on there, you order what you need, and when it comes to your house, it takes a month. That’s just what it is. And we’ll get into that and we’ll talk about pros and cons, all of these things. So let me start out once again with the local stuff. I’m not going to bore you with what I just talked about. All I can say is brick and mortar. Without those guys, this hobby wouldn’t be a hobby. I really don’t think so. They’re the reason why our parents got another reasons why half the people who are into it stay into it. Go visit them. They need our help. And I know sometimes it sucks because they have to pay for a place and they don’t sell big volume so they can’t cut to the bare bone. They have to make a profit. So their prices are typically going to be higher. But what you’re paying for is you’re going to get that face to face interaction. You’re going to have a relationship with people that you know, and with any luck, if they’re doing their job right, they’re people you’re going to like. Although, like when I talk about the old school ones, they’re like, this is the way it is tough. It’s my story. You can take it or leave it. Some of them are like that, but most of them aren’t. I mean, most of them are just really good people who love the hobby just like we do. So in my local area in Fayetteville, North Carolina, it is Hayes Hobby house. That’s one of the places to go to, but you can always go to HobbyTown USA. There was my other local store, and I think they’re Hobbytown.com, I think. And I know Hays Hobby house is Hayes Hobby house.com. And it’s ho. A-Y-E-S. Hobby. Hobby? House. Just like your normal house house.com. So there’s those guys. And then I know if you go to Raleigh, it’s like Hangar 18 and Raleigh Hobby Shop. They all have a.com but those are the two stores in Raleigh that you can go to. I’ve been to Hangar 18, and they’re just like my local hobby. So really like a small hole in the wall, little strip mall kind of place. But they’ve got planes just stuffed to the gills in there. And they’ve got all the stuff, and they’ve got the knowledge. They’re the kind of people you want to go and talk to. The other place you can do that’s local is go to swap meets or flea markets. And what you’ll do is there’ll be local Joes trying to sell their stuff. And some are there every week, and some just show up for a little bit and you might find a great deal because they’re just looking to clear out their house. Please, for the love of God, take my stuff. And heck, if you’re just like, I’m kind of getting into it. They’re like, here’s a transmitter. Here’s some receivers. You have to buy your own batteries. Here’s a clunky plane. I know it used to fly. I’m sure you could figure it out, kid. Here you go. Just go have fun. In a hobby, sometimes it’ll be like that. You may not find that, but you never know what you’ll find. But it’s usually pretty interesting what you do find. So if you get a chance to go to a swap meeter, and the best place to find that out is go to your local club, your flying club, and ask them like, hey, do you guys have a swap meet or anything like that? Oftentimes when they have a fly in, they’ll have everybody kind of bring their stuff and they’ll do a local swap meet kind of deal. Just ask around again. If you have a local hobby store like we do, ask them like, hey, is there a swap meet coming up? Because I’d like to see about getting it down to have a ton of money, but I was hoping to see what you could do. So they’re great resources. Now I’m going to get into us. Stores. US. Stores are like they are US owned establishments that have a strong presence online. Typically what you get with them is you’re going to get great customer service. You’ll have super fast shipping because they’ve got to compete with everywhere else, including Amazon but their state side. So if you’re like me, they speak my language. Wherever you’re at, get a store that’s in your country don’t speak your language and it makes it really easy and you’ll have a very low wait time on your parts and they know what they’re doing. You can call them up, they’re just like a normal other store. Maybe you have to send an email to get an initial contact, but usually if you buy anything from call them up, they’ll work with you. A lot of people tell that they call up with a problem and they’ll just send them a replacement part. They’ll say, just send it in, we’re already sending something to you, you have it tomorrow. And they’re really responsive and very positive. So let me give you a list of the ones that I know you can go to and these are all whatever.com. So Horizon Hobby, that’s a long running hobby store. Tower Hobbies. And again, some of these lately, some of them have had some troubles and they’ve been bought out by other guys. But I know if you look up these stores, they go to a website, it will have a whole list of products you want to buy and they’re happy to help you. So horizon. Abby Tower, Hobbies, hobby Zone. That’s all. One word race day, quads. If you’re looking, if you like quadcopters, or if you want to get into first person view stuff, almost all of the quad copter stuff is like heavy and FPV, without FPV, quadracing doesn’t happen. So if you want to get into that, those guys talk to them, they’ll get to Square, so Racedayquads.com, Get FPV, so first person view, so FPV, you can go to hobbytown.com. They have stores locally, but they also have a national presence, motion RC. They tend to have a lot of great arcs. So I’m also ready to fly planes or plug and play planes. They’ll sometimes have kits and they have a handful of parts and pieces, batteries, replacement parts for their planes. Honestly, they have a whole series that’s like $100 and under of great flyers that are like jets and other really fun planes. So take a look at them. I’ve actually bought a plane or two from them. I’ve been very happy with them. I’ve used race day quads. Get FPV. I go to my local Hobby town store all the time. I don’t think I’ve used Horizon Hobby and Tower Hobbies, but they have been a staple or a mainstay in the industry for a while. I know Hobbies, owned by all of their accounts, has been really good and I think a main Hobbies, I’m leaving that at the end because that’s ultimately flight test representative store. They kind of pulled all the flight test products. And they said, hey, look, let us manage all your shipping stuff. We’ll beat your storefront. Just you do your thing and we’ll pull your stuff under our umbrella and we’ll take care of that way you guys can do what you do and we’ll take care of the other parts. Like that’s part of what we love doing. And we got an established system. So amain hobbies a Maine hobbies hobbies. And then we’re going to try if we can get more than 50 characters in there, we’ll have a link, maybe we’ll just have a link to a file that we have on our Google Drive that just has the links to all these things. So basically, they’re the store flighttest.com. So if you go to Store Flighttest.com, when you order something, you’re ordering through a main. Hobbies, again, they’re kind of like the same deal. They’re a staple. They’ve got great people. They know what they’re doing. They know what they’re talking about. And I’m only scratching the surface. These are only ones that I’ve checked out. So you keep searching around, you’ll find more. So let’s see. So most of those things you’ll be able to get full kits. So you’ll be able to get almost ready to fly. You get plug and play like Horizon. Hobbies has a whole line of E Flight. E Flight is typically like we want to get you in the hobby. So when you buy this box, you’ll have a transmitter, a receiver, a plane, a couple of batteries, a pamphlet on how to get started, and good luck. You can do it, and it’s everything you need. I think their kids started about $120 that are like that, and they move on up. It depends on what you want to do. And if you’re the kind of person who’s not a big fan of building, go to those websites. They’ve got some really good reasonably priced starter planes that are going to make you really happy. So I really can’t urge that enough. Now we’re going to get into and of course you have Amazon.com. So I mean, anything you have on there is typically going through one of these stores that I just mentioned, but they typically will if they can, we’ll guarantee an overnight shipping or a couple of day shipping if you have prime and all that kind of stuff. But you got to watch that though, when you’re buying hobby parts, because they may not have prime. And that is oftentimes means it’s coming from China, actually. So you’re making an order and they’re shunting it through the China store. And it will be there in a month. Whenever it says it’s going to take a month or two, it’s probably coming from a storefront out of China. Oftentimes. Hobby King is one of those, and Hobby King’s in the next category, a Chinese store with a US. Warehouse. So there are two stores, and I know there’s more. One is Banggood.com, and I have the weirdest name in the world. It’s. B-A-N-G-G-O-O-D. Bang. Good. All one word. And so they’ve got a ton of really good parts and pieces that are cheap. They also do like China does, which is basically find somebody where a design is hot and they will just rip it off and undersell it and undercut it and send you a lower quality, lower price, and I guess easier to get hold of kit than what you can buy state side. And so it’s enticing Hobby King does similar kind of thing. But just keep in mind that you may not be buying the same quality product as you would from the original manufacturer or from a reputable dealer in the United States. And I won’t get into that. It’s a whole topic for a different day. So what these do is they have a US warehouse, which means if you buy from that warehouse, it will be shipped to you within a week. So if you’re looking for quick times and a pretty large selection and a pretty low price, you can do that. Now, a lot of people have we’ve had mixed reviews about Hobby King’s, customer service, and Bang Good. It’s about the same where you kind of like say, hey, this thing came like somebody ran over with a truck. Can I have a replacement? They’re like, well, let’s see some pictures. But if you’re actually looking to get advice or I’ve got this project, I could use some help, they’re not going to be able to help you. Whereas most of those US guys, you ask them, you tell them what you’re aiming for, and they’ll help you get there. And then China Direct is basically the banggood that isn’t the US warehouse or hobbyken.com that isn’t the US warehouse. You can also go to AliExpress, which is basically conglomerate of a lot of little shops. So basically all the individual little manufacturers and hobby stores that are pulling all these hobby parts together for distribution, they have a storefront on AliExpress. And so you’re getting pretty close to wholesale cost. And again, it will take a month. All of these, it’s going to take about a month to get to your house. You’re getting very inexpensive prices. It allows somebody who’s new to the hobby to actually get into the hobby and stay in while they’re losing their, you know, busting their props. And I just tanked my motor into the dirt and I think I destroyed it. Or my ESC, all of them just blew up. And I can’t afford like a $25 ESC from this local guy. But this is weird Chinese place. He says they’ll sell it to me for $4. I guess I could do it. As much as I want to say poo poo on China, I also understand that when you’re trying to get in the hobby and you don’t have much money and you’re still trying it out and you got that taste of excitement and a taste of, boy, I love this, but I can’t keep doing it at the price that’s costing me. This is a way for people to stay in the hobby until maybe something turns around and they can start ordering from the better customer service oriented outfits that I talked about earlier. And again, I’m not poopooing them. I buy from Banggood all the time. I bought from Hobby King. They’ve got a lot of really neat products, a lot of good products. They’re not all bad, but they also have a bunch of knockoffs that are clearly indirectly undercutting US patented designs. And if you’re against that kind of thing, they may not be your go to. Same with AliExpress. That’s, again, literally a kilometer of all the different Chinese manufacturers. But you get a good price. And when you’re doing something like I’m pondering doing a project with 20 motors on it or some nonsense, I don’t have money to just throw down the toilet and flush. So I got to be smart about how I spend it. So I tend to look there for some of those parts. But when I can, when I’m looking for something that I know I’m going to be coming back to and looking to get excited about over and over again, I’m going to my local store or I’m going to go to the race day quads or get FPV again, I’ve been there to both of the stores a lot. They’re really excellent. My local Hobby Town store is a great owner, good guy, and they’ve got a lot of great people working for them. So I can’t say enough about how awesome, like the GearBest and the wish.com and all that kind of stuff. They’re on the order of bengood. They just may not be as hobby oriented. But if you wanted to get a good RC car that you can bang around and you don’t care, that’s $50. It wasn’t a big deal. So maybe those are the sites you go to. But if you start wanting to get some quality products, go find your US dealer and talk to them. That’s a lot. But that’s all I have. It’s a lot of information, but it’s good information because one outlet may not have everything you’re looking for. There’s a couple of different places to look and right, and some of them specialize in kits and products that are mostly put together. Some of them specialize in parts and pieces. And if you’re getting a kit, it’s going to be like a Balsa kit where you literally are getting a pile of sticks and some press cut or laser cut pieces and it’s full assembled, baby, get to it. I love that kind of stuff. That’s for me. But it’s not for everybody. And there’s some that are in between where it’s minimal here’s about three or four different pieces you kind of got to put together and then you’re going to have to put in your own electronics. And for me, if I’m already doing that, the only benefit to ordering something like that is because it’s made out of a different foam. I can’t really get a hold of I’m not going to go too far down the rabbit hole, but EPP is a type of foam that is incredibly resilient, and it’s strong enough and it’s rubbery enough where it survives. That’s the kind that you can almost bend it completely on itself and let go, and it’ll come back to its original shape, and it doesn’t crush. It just basically bounces back to whatever it was, which, when you’re building a flying wing, that’s awesome because you can bang it straight into a wall and you just pick it up and fly it off again. You know, it’s great. I can’t buy that phone. I don’t know where you would buy any of it. Like, where’s the local supplier? As far as I know, there isn’t one. So if I want that material, I’ve got to go find a plane from one of these websites here and say, hey, do you have one of these? And I’ll buy it from there because it’s made out of that product that I can’t buy myself. But otherwise I’ll go to Dollar Tree and get a bunch of foam board and figure out how to do it either myself or go to flight test and see if they’ve got their or their forums. Somebody’s put together some plans or some ideas on how they might build what you’re thinking of, because it’s probably out there between that and Rcgroups.com, they’re both great sources for what people can do in the hobby. If you want to see what you can do with some really inexpensive materials, seems like we’ve pretty well gone through everything you had listed in your store notes. Well, did you have any questions, I guess is the big part. I’ve listed a bunch of things. Do you have any questions about the different kinds of stores or why is the Hobby Lobby on that list or something like that? I did, but I don’t right now. But I know you mentioned when we were talking about earlier, I said I think there’s a rumor of Hobby Lobby coming to town. But, yeah, I was thinking maybe that would be a local source. But you said Hobby Lobby really isn’t in this hobby, right? So there’s actually a distinction between there’s a hobby store called Hobby Lobby, and it actually spawned a lot of people who started a bunch of other stores, and that Hobby Lobby from way back in the day. I think it’s closed now is or change names. That’s a really good hobby store, if that’s what you’re thinking of. But we’re thinking of the chain Hobby Lobby that comes like it’s almost like a big box Hobby Lobby, like a Michaels and whatever kind of store those I guess they used to carry remote. Control airplanes. And the problem with that is, as we both know, you take a plane out, you buy it, it’s brand new, and a day later, you come back with a broken heap of something and say, my plane didn’t work. And then they had to return it and have to deal with all the time having to deal with their customer. And they weren’t making any money on those things. So I guess they decided, forget it. I’m not dealing with this. Because they’re dealing with typically, I’ll call it the uneducated masses. So these are Mom, I want to buy a plane. Okay, cool. They buy the kit, and why doesn’t it work? Right? They’re not going like, we’re the hobby store. They’ll say, Look, I’m going to sell you this. I’m happy to do it, but I want to caution you person to person, this is how this works. This is what you can expect. Here are ways to get proficient before you get out and break your plane. Here’s a couple of people you should go talk to. They’ll help you get in the air successfully. Like, that’s the difference between, like, a hobby lobby, you just got employees. You don’t give a crap. Just buy something, please. Not that they’re all like that, but I’m just saying in general, like a big box store, they’re just trying to get products on the shelf so that you can pick it out and go home. Whereas a hobby store wants to have you have success, and they’re that big box version. Every type of store caters to what it caters to. That’s going to be the difference between big box stores versus your more local business that’s going to be able to provide you with what you’re looking for. Exactly. Okay, so I think that’s got you done with all the stores, us websites, all that. We said that you had some interview you were going to do with a gentleman at Hays. So due to the power magic of editing, we’re going to roll that audio right now. I’m sitting here with Alan Hayes of Hayes Hobby House here in Fayette, North Carolina, and I asked him if we could sit down and just kind of talk about what it means to be a local brick and mortar and one of the benefits of coming down here. But before we get into it, I’m going to give him ten minutes to give us some train wreck in the dump. Just kind of let us know what he’s all about in about 10 seconds and go, well, we’ve been here about 51 years now. Of course, we wouldn’t be here without you, the customer. We want everybody that comes in here to leave with a smile and to have a good experience. Awesome. That was pretty close. 10 seconds. I’m impressed. All right, so you are our inaugural interview. I put figures out to a couple of people, but it seems like we were able to kind of meet up right on time. So we just finished our recording, our episode three, which is where we talk about where you can get your parts and pieces. And when I think of where am I going to get my stuff, I always like to point people. Anybody who’s asking, go find out where your local hobby store if you haven’t found it, same on you. Go find it. Those guys are great. So I guess let’s start with kind of what sparked you in the RC hobby. Now, you said you’ve been here 51 years, and I don’t think if you are 51 years old, you’re not much over 51. Well, the shop has been here for 51 years. I have actually been working here being paid for about 45 years now. Okay. All right. I’m pushing the 60 mark. All right, well, cool. Have you found an error to pass this on to? Are you looking to just close it up and say, forget about it? I have a five year old and a three year old grandson coming up, so maybe see how interested they might be. Just see where it goes. All I can do is introduce it and let it roll. Exactly. Yeah. As I’m fine with my kids. Excellent. Well, boy, I better start getting purchasing as much as I can. Okay. Our podcast is aimed it’s called Aviation RC noob. So we are aimed at trying to help the new guy who’s just discovering this hobby. Typically I’ll call inexpensively. Right now, we kind of promote flight tests because that’s just I mean, you don’t need much money to get started with that. Absolutely. And when you crash, you’re not losing all your money because people come into your store all the time kind of wandering in. We live right near Fort Bags, so there are people coming in from all over the country. This might be their first job because they’re coming right out of high school, and they just go into the military and they’re here and they finally have some money, and they’re like, what do I do with it? And they know they like stuff that you have in your store. So what do you recommend to them? Well, it depends on what their interests are. Of course, with radio control aircraft, you have to kind of get a feel for what their interests are, what their skill level is, and if they’re new. Of course, you always want to start out with more of a high wing, something slow, stable, let your feet grow into it. So, of course, you have flight test kits, as you mentioned, to get started. You have actually bostlewood kits to build for those that are enthusiastic and enjoy that part of it. I want to try that. Of course, arps and ready to flies are the quick and easy way to get in it. Right. And what manufacturers should people kind of go to look at if they’re kind of homes on. Where would I go look for that? Well, as far as distributors go, that we have, of course, we do sell flight test product. Sure. And we have the Horizon branded products. The proprietary lines being Hobby zone park Zone, hangar nine. Okay. So you have those major brands which they also carry FMS lines as well. Okay. And it seems to me when I’m looking around, that the E Flight brand is more for small park level sizes. Correct. And then as you get up into the Hanger Nine is like the big size, the bigger wooden. Yes. So you’re looking at just where you kind of fly. That’s a big question, I’m sure. So you got a kid who comes in here, they’ve got a parent in tow, and they’re jazzed up. They’re like, come on, let’s do it. What do you recommend to them if they’re in and you see that their parents kind of kind of along for the ride and going, well, we’ll see. Well, the biggest thing we try to push is to get started on the right foot to get someone to teach them how to fly. Okay. Buy a good trainer to learn on slow, stable. Right. But primarily get with one of the local clubs or an individual that you may know personally that can work with you and teach you how to fly so that you don’t pick up bad habits. Bad habits like what? Crashing straight into the ground? Number one thing. Yes. That’s a little more expensive going that route. Tell me about it. But the new electronics we have afford the individual to learn to fly on their own because of safe technology. The flight controllers we have that are available, and a lot of the auto stuff. Now the auto leveling and all, you have that. But it’s still a good idea to get somebody to work with you, teach you how to fly. It’s a lot less expensive, that’s for sure. I agree. Okay, so what if the kid, he’s in there, he’s got his parents, parents are excited to go with them. What if his parents aren’t like they’re clearly out of it. They’re like, they’re here. It’s just a checkbook to write the thing. Does it change your recommendation? Well, not really. The biggest thing is just try to get them to take the individual, take their child out to a local field and see what it’s about, meet the guys that fly. You get to see a lot of different aircraft and kind of get a feel for it. It’s a good learning experience. I agree. So no matter what age you’re at, no matter what skill level you are, there’s always something there for you. And you’re in the scouts. You’re a scout leader. So you have scouts, you have flying. You have a lot of different aspects of hobbying to get into. Yeah, but if you want to fly, if you’re not certain about it, take them out to the field, let them get a feel for what’s going on and see exactly what it’s all about in the camaraderie that’s there and the health that’s out there. Yes, it’s a good idea. I know. I’ve thought about bringing having overnight with the scouts at one of the fly events because we’ll be able to help out with maybe some of the cooking and some of the whatever. In that way they can all kind of get a sense of it and the parents kind of get a sense of it. If they like it, they like it, and if they don’t, it was a fun outing. They could see some planes fly around like fools to introduce it. Exactly. And then, like you said, if the spark takes hold and you fan the flame so let’s see, what’s the biggest beginner mistake you make? Because I’m sure you sell a plane and then in about a day or two or a week or two later, somebody comes back and going, hey, this is what happened. What do you see? Yeah, that’s an open question there. There’s a lot of scenarios that go along with that. The biggest thing is trying to learn to fly on your own. And if you don’t understand flight characteristics, how an airplane flies, why it flies, you can get yourself in trouble in a hurry. Usually what I have actually told individuals is if you go out and try to fly by yourself and you don’t understand how all this works, your first flight will be brief and it will be your last. As bad as that is to say no, but it’s true because it’s so discouraging when you’re like it’s up in the oh, no, it’s not. And it’s a matter of seconds before your plane is done for. You know this. When that airplane turns around and looks at you, your lefts are rights and your rights are left, and you get in that a moment and you just lock up, right? And you don’t have that guy at the field that says, just turn around, dude. Just turn around. It’s okay. That quarter step look over your shoulder. Exactly. You may look foolish, but at least you get your plane down. Correct. There’s just a lot of different scenarios. But that’s an open question. Yes, I know. It is kind of an open question. Do you oftentimes recommend simulators? That is a real good plus, especially with the younger generation being in the gaming community. They are for the most part, right. It is a great learning tool. And if you can fly the SIM, if you can look at that little 15 or 17 inch screen that you may have on your computer and you can control that aircraft and put it down the middle of the runway and land it, you get out to the field. You’ve got a wide field of view. It’s a whole lot easier to fly that actual aircraft than it is to sit there and look at that flight simulator, look at, like, a tiny little dot on the screen and hope. But it’s a great learning tool because you can incorporate a lot of features into that, depending on what firmware you buy, of course. Right. But it will also take you a lot further down the road. It’s just not a basic learning tool. It takes you into aerobatics, and whatever you get into, it helps you with your timing and your eye and coordination. Yes. You can keep learning with it. It’s not just basically getting into the air and getting comfortable with that. It’s saying, hey, I want to try a new I want to try inverted flight. Well, the first time I tried it with a plane, it didn’t end so well, but I tried it in a simulator a bunch, and next time I went out, I was a lot more comfortable with what my brain was thinking and how to translate that into motions that will get the plane where I want it. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So let’s see. Why do you keep going? Obviously, this is a business. It makes you money, and it helps employ a handful of people. What keeps you going? Obviously, it’s more than just well, for me, it’s still a passion. I still enjoy that part. I’ve been in it since I can remember for the past 51, two, three years, and I’ve not turned it off. I’ve slowed down at times. Life gets in the way, but I still have the passion. I enjoy the people. Sure. It’s great to get somebody flying, get them into something new and then see them progress. That’s a reward for me. And then you get the guys that have been around a long time, we can learn new product. We talk about new product, and I learn from my customers. I bet you do. I can’t fly. I can’t run. I can’t drive, everything that we have. But I learn a lot from the customer, so that keeps me fueled up. So you got people who are all over. Let’s assume we’re reaching everybody across different spots across the world. Would you recommend to them? If you want to know what’s kind of going on in the industry, to talk to your local to talk to your local guys, because they’ve heard about everything, like talking to a tow truck driver. If a customer is focused on a particular aspect of the hobby community or whatever it may be he’s into, he’s more focused on that. I’ve got to kind of deal with all of it, but he’ll know a lot of times what’s coming out before I do. It seems like they usually know before the manufacturers know. I know. Right. Oh, my gosh. Let’s see. What questions should new hobbyists be asking a person like yourself? Because we know what kind of questions we come in here and ask. I want to fly a jet. Can we play it. What is an EDF thing? Should I do electric? Why is that gas? Like, what should we be asking as new guys when we go into a store? Should we sing I’ve got $3,000, hook me up, or what should we be doing? Well, I mean, from a salesman’s point of view, that’s great, but being a modeler and hobbyist myself, you want to get them started on the right track. The biggest thing is be truthful with who you’re working with. As far as the customer being truthful to me as to what their level of experience is, sure, I get a lot. My brother flew, my dad flies, my uncle had, and I did this and I did that. And that’s great. Okay, well, that’s telling me now that you have some knowledge of what’s going on, right. You’re around it, but if you have been in it, I need to know what your level of experience is so that I can start from the very basics or we can start middle ground and work from there. But I need to know what your experience is so that I can get you started on the right foot. Exactly. Yeah, I agree. So just come equipped with honesty about where you’re at and what you’re interested in. Any of it. Definitely makes a difference. Yes. Nice. So what’s your favorite part about interacting with a new hobbyist? Right. It seems like I remember coming in here, nothing but excitement and like we’re going to do it. And then you get that first experience where it may be not went so well, and maybe the excitement kind of waned just a little. What do you like about it? Because, Jim, you see a bunch of different types of new hobbyists, new to RC cars. You got people who are new scale modelers. Obviously, your shop has almost every single type of I’ll call it scale hobbying. So you’ve got the plastic models for the trains. You’ve got general plastic bottles. You’ve got rocketry, you have quadcopters. You have RC planes, you have RC cars and balsa wood and all the original. We’re talking all the stuff that’s been around. And you’ve got all of it a little taste of everything, which is really awesome. So when I come in here, I know if I’m curious about something, I know where I’m going to come. Just lost some train of thought. Oh, no, that’s okay. Blew me away. I know, right? What’s your favorite part about interacting with new? That’s the thing, is trying to educate them and see them grow. Okay. We all trip up. I mean, it’s part of it. Anytime anything new comes out, we all have to learn it. We’ve all been at that low level at some point in this game. It’s a learning experience for all of us. Yeah. And that’s, I guess, is seeing the individual progress, seeing that enthusiasm and then bringing that into a true excitement and skill and hobby. Seeing a guy, hey, man, I’m flying this. I want to build a kit. And then two, three, four weeks later, him bring that in here and just see the quality of work that has been accomplished, seeing what people are capable of doing, and that’s rewarding. It really is. Yeah. That’s great. Nice. I agree. As I watch my friends. So part of this started because I started about three years ago and I’ve been progressing pretty steadily, and I’m starting to feel most comfortable in the field, as opposed to going, oh gosh, I hope I don’t take it to the ground this time. I got my buddy just started, so we’re getting him in with some flight test stuff. He’s in the middle of nowhere, South Carolina. That’s not true. He’s in Sumter, South Carolina. Okay. But I get to watch him as he’s starting, as he’s growing, and he just got his first real flight in, so he’s super excited. So I get to see the same kind of deal. It’s so open and to be able to see people’s ideas and for them to bring that in and do their own thing, and it’s not cut and dry by the manual, seeing make changes to stuff and see it work and go, wow, I never thought we all learned. It’s a constant learning. Nice. Yeah. And then, of course, you can share that with the club that comes here and does their meetings as well as any of the other hobbyists that come in. I know the feather in my cap to pass on. Exactly. That’s great. What is your best advice? I know that’s really open ended, but if you could give one piece of advice to a hobbyist who’s out there right. Not initially new, although as much as it would be great. Right. What would you recommend? I know it’s kind of open ended. Well, I guess the biggest thing was just ask for help. There you go. Ask for help. Because we’re all here for the same purpose. Regardless of what avenue you’re in, what your discipline is, we’re all here for the same purpose. We don’t all know everything. We think we do, but we don’t all know everything. So for help, somebody out there can usually work you through your issue if you have. That good. Yeah. This community is all about that. It really is. Absolutely. So that’s good. That’s for help, don’t forget. Where are you taking yourself on hobby? You’ve been in it since you were little. I imagine a lot of this is old hat, but I know there’s a lot of new innovations that have been coming out in the last ten years, which are tremendous. So where are you taking yourself? Well, here again, like I said before, it’s a constant learning. This turbo Timber sitting here on the table in front of us with plug and play, putting one of the new Spectrum Telemetry receivers in it, one of the new smart ESCs in it, speed controls in it. Yeah, because I want to play around with the new telemetry, see what this is all about. Okay. So there’s always something out there to progress into. Absolutely. And it keeps me going. And I’ve lost a lot of friends that I grew up flying with because we’re all getting up in age. Yeah. You bring the newcomers in and they’ve got a new ideas on flying new aircraft. The electronics are constantly changing, so it’s always learning. But now that I’ve got two grandsons, I’m looking forward to them. Don’t want me to grow up too fast. I’m looking forward to them getting to the age where I can share some of this and see where they want to go. Exactly. Again. At least introduce it to them, right? Yeah, exactly. Like I said, I’ve run into the same thing with my kids. I’m like, okay, I’m excited about it. I’d love you to be, but I realized that’s maybe not your thing. And what advantages now, this is kind of more allowing you to help with the sales pitch, but in the episode, I talk about all the benefits of a local hobby store where you can bring your model in and look at the actual issue at hand and really go back and forth and try to pinpoint all the issues that might be happening. And you typically have a product that can maybe help solve that problem. What would be the advantages of going to the local hobby store, especially for a new hobbyist? Well, number one is hands on. You get to see the product you might be interested in purchasing. You can actually touch it, look at it. We don’t have a problem taking something out of a box or opening up a lid and letting someone actually look at the product they’re interested in. I can’t display everything that we have. Unfortunately, you wouldn’t have much of a shop to walk around, but that’s number one. We’re always here to help. Like I said before, I don’t know everything, but I have customers that I can rely on, I can go to with certain issues, and by talking with the people, then that helps me with certain issues. It’s troubleshooting. A lot of it is troubleshooting, really, and a lot of it’s brought on by ourselves. It’s usually self inflicted. But I mean, if you have a problem with a product, instead of being on a phone, which I do constantly too, it’s a whole lot easier if you have it in front of you. You can actually see what’s going on and trying to vision and rely on what the customer is trying to tell you and maybe trade pictures back and forth. Yeah. Good. Well, I mean, that’s the end of the question. So we’re going to go to a quick lightning round and that’s just going to be a series of kind of this or that questions. I didn’t really bring it up, but it’s going to be really fast. And then I think that’ll pretty much conclude the interview. Unless there’s and I want you to at the end of that plug what you want plug. I want to hear what you want to share with our listeners. So let’s see. Wing or plane? So flying. Wing or plane? Plane or club fly. Club. Fly. World War I. World. Two or experimental craft? Say world War II. Okay. Scratch or ready? Built? I like to scratch. I like to build. I like to build. I’m the same way. Loctite. Red or blue? Blue. Pen or pencil? Pencil. Sitterstand? Stand. Pinch your thumb. What? Pinch your thumb stick. Now? Yes. I’m a thumb flyer. I’m a thumb flower. Okay. Yeah, me too. Creamy or chunky? Creamy. Okay. If you add fluff, does it change your answer? Probably not. Okay, good. Well, that’s it. So at this point, why don’t you just tell us about his hobby house and see if our listeners can if they’re interested, they want to talk to you more about maybe anything that they have let us know how to reach you. Well, like I said early, we’ve been here for 51 years now. My parents started the business I grew up in. This got some really good employees that are very knowledgeable in their realm. I can hobby that. They’re amazing. The car guys, playing guys, mics great with plastics. Wow. I just lost it. That’s okay. Well, we’re going to go online if they want to kind of understand. We’ve got probably 200 plus years of combined experience in the hobby industry with all of us here. We would not be here without the customer. We enjoy what we do. We’re all passionate about what we do in this hobby, and we try to pass that on to our customers. You do a good job. We have. Our customer base is the reason that we are here, and that has allowed us to grow and be here in this length of time. It’s all about customers. Yes. But mostly their friends. Yeah. That’s what it is. Yeah. So how can they reach you online? And how would you prefer them to reach out to you? If they’re interested in learning more about your store, call us. Okay. We have a website. It’s Hazehobby.com, but it’s more of a blog page. So we put on their new product coming out. We do have Facebook here again, same thing we put out there coming to the store. We got this new thing. Yeah. Try to do some of that. I’m not really good at that stuff. I kind of let the other guys handle it, but we do that. And, of course, call us. Well, how can they do that? As far as call us 910-485-2337, but we’d much rather have you come visit. I’m with you. Yeah. Good. Excellent. Thank you so much, Alan. I appreciate your time today. Thank you for that invite. All right. It’s been a lot of fun. Yeah, sure. Thank you. All right, well, I’m definitely looking forward to being able to listen to that interview when I go to do the editing on this episode. Matthew, thank you for doing the footwork on getting with the hobby shop owner for that interview. I’m happy to do it. And I think you’re working on getting some other interviews potentially lined up. Yeah, I’d like to have a handful of experts, especially as we start getting into the technical stuff like motors and speed controllers and a bunch of other things. So we’re working on some things. Hopefully we’ll have them by the time we make the episodes. If not, we’ll add it to whatever episode we’re on because I think it’s always helpful to have more information about what we’re doing in the hobby. All right, well, I think we’ve been going at this for quite a while, probably I’ll start wrapping it up. That said, Matthew, any final thoughts for today? No additional thoughts. Just get out there and fly. Get out there and build. Have a good time. Remember, that’s what it’s all about. If you’re not having fun, you’re probably doing it wrong. Hey, guys, joe here. I did want to take a second and thank you everybody, for tuning in, listening normal, outro spiel. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter. Aviation RC noob. We’re also on itunes and Google Music. I learned during that process that Google Music and Google Podcasts are two different platforms. So we’ll be getting up and running on Google Podcasts as well as Spotify and hopefully a few others in the near future. Now that I’m working from home, Matthew as well will have time to look into that. And yeah, listen, these are certainly unprecedented times, and I don’t necessarily have a negative wisdom for everybody other than just keep doing what we can. Stay positive. This too will pass and do everything you can to stay safe, but at the same time, we can still enjoy the hobby. I’m doing a little building on my end. I have gotten to get out and do some flying during this time. I know Matthew has as well. So keep enjoying the hobby, but do it safe. Follow recommendations, avoid the crowds, fly where it’s safe, where you’re allowed to. If you’re in areas where there’s full lockdown, hey, just go into full build mode. We’re certainly looking at many areas being completely locked down, so if you’ve already gone into that, I hope you have plenty of foam board to work with. And if you haven’t gone through that or haven’t had that implemented in your area yet, but you think it may be coming, certainly worth making it run by the dollar tree. Stocking up on some phone board for potential week, two week, however long. Possible complete lockdown there. Grab some foam, and if that happens, just keep building. I know Matthew continuously is on the forums, so feel free to. Pop into the forums and share your builds and certainly tag at Fomidm and he’ll get a notification, I’m sure, through the forum platform. And he’d be more than thrilled to swing by and have a look at stuff and interact with everybody. Feel free to reach out to us at aviationrcnoob@gmail.com with any questions, comments or anything else that you have. We have received a couple of emails from listeners from you guys and have enjoyed reading those and talking about them. But yeah, guys, just please stay safe and have fun. Have fun building, have fun playing if you can. You’re do what you can and be safe. We’ll catch you next time.