HEY GUY, aren’t you one of the R/C Airplane pilots from MVRC? You come on in the Coffee Shoppe and take a seat down by Mary Lou’s picture just after she had that “special surgery” done.

Well how have things been while I was away? You got it, the Coffee Shoppe is open again! I was away for a couple of years while I sorted out some of my thought processes and decided that RC Airplanes people weren’t so bad after all. If you ever kept up with the Coffee Shoppe stuff in the past, then you know we had some wild times. You remember when the whole shop nearly burned down when I installed the old wood stove to make Mama Mac’s Old House Brew corn whiskey?

I understand you guys are now flying some kind of FOAM PLANES…….what the heck is that all about? I remember when most of your planes were built from balsa and plywood.

You know, last week I had a salesman drop by the shop trying to sell me one of those new 4-G Bio-Gig something another laptop computer! Hey, if I’m going to buy something called a laptop, it better be able to dance, OK! Anyway, he was telling me all about that laptop and how it runs on these new high powered really light batteries. Let me see now, what was it…….Lipa something….nope, maybe Lipto…..nope! Heck, I don’t remember what it was, anyway I wasn’t that busy so I let him talk on.

He was all fired up about those little batteries he had and how they are used to fly ALL KINDS of RC planes. He said some people were replacing their “glo” type engines with electric stuff now and there are hundreds of planes being built for battery power. He said one fellow went down to a hardware store and bought what they call “Blue Foam” that builders put up behind that fancy plastic siding, can you image that! He asked me to go look in his car with him and he’d show me one of them. So, I hollered at Mary Lou to watch the front and I’d be back in just a jiffy. Well, when we got out there, he had one of those blue planes in the trunk! It looked a lot like one of those jets stationed down in Virginia Beach. He pulled out this small package with one black wire and one red wire coming out from under some aluminum foil looking stuff and meeting at a plug-in. On the same end, was a little white plug that was stuck on the ends of these little bitty red, yellow, white and black wires running back into the battery. As I understood him, it had to be balanced just right, guess that’s the new C/G?

He told me that battery had enough power to fly this little Blue Foam Mini-jet for almost 10 minutes. Then he commenced to tell me about something he called “Many Amps” of power for longer flights. As I remember, he said that little pack had 20 Cee’s, whatever that is! Next he grabbed a little box, plugged it into his cigarette lighter and I saw these lights start blinking and I heard some kind of bell sounding thing go off. Now, that’s when I jumped back, cause the last time I heard that noise, the whole back end of my 1949 Buick station wagon caught on fire! He laughed at me and said, come back here, that was only the balancer talking to the charger! Man, you got to be kidding, them little parts talk to one another by some kind of blinking lights and a buzzer?

Now it was getting time for me to get back in the shop before Mary Lou came looking for me. But before I had time to leave, that guy had tossed that jet in the air and that electric motor was whizzing away and that plane sounded like it was being pushed by 27 of the tightest wound rubber-bands that you had ever heard. It shot right up into the air, rolled over twice and did what he called a Split-S! Well, I never seen nothing like it, that little blue FOAMIE plane was up and going, whizzing here and there, splitten them S’s like nobody’s business. After he landed, I watched him put it back in the trunk with the biggest grin on a grown man’s face that I have ever seen. Wow, I could fly that little thing in my own back yard. He guys, you come back now and I’ll tell you about the Tri-plane he had!