Page 21 - MFW June 2025

also supplied quite a bit of photographic equipment to the Oscilloscope adventures
division run by my modelling colleague it certainly didn’t I was somewhat fortunate having limited access to state
take a great deal of time for the penny to drop and a of the art electronic test equipment however given the
number of enthusiastic modellers established a pseudo limited nature of this arrangement I thought longingly
company & began dealing in Futaba, even given that wouldn’t it be nice to own an oscilloscope then low And
bonus due to the then strict import licencing restrictions behold practical electronics a staple English magazine
delivery was painfully slow and by today’s standards published a construction article on this very subject, once
price was prohibitive, it did however give us access to the again postal notes were collected for purchase of the
newest equipment & also after a lot of difficulty circuit specialised parts theses turned out to be a 3” war surplus
diagrams for the Futaba range. tube & a specifically wound transformer(once again old
sayings come to mind about fools rushing in where
By this time we were into dual rates and crude expo but of angels fear to tread) this thing was built on Vero board a
course not yet servo reversing Yup hard to believe now, I perforated paxilon material with strips of copper running
had a busy time doing dual rates extra channels etc. for a one way, surprisingly despite the lethal 800volt tube
good number of people from various parts of the country supply I managed to build the thing and not noticeably
no thought of making money just the naïve excitement of shorten my own life span, it certainly showed all sorts of
doing it. wave forms but nothing that I recognized or that was of
any use to me, somewhat discouraged I put that venture
to one side and went back to limited access.
Moving on with the
Futaba brand one of One would assume once
the group had a son bitten twice shy but after I
who had taken up a had licked my wounds and
year’s assignment in a recovered from the non-
pacific protectorate performance of my project
and it wasn’t too long in Mid 1978 along came
before the brilliant idea another oscilloscope
of a dealership for that project this time from
small island nation was Practical Wireless a very
established with both well respected radio &
Futaba & OS we then electronics publication, a
b e g a n r e c e i v i n g genuine 5MHZ scope great
for the time and unheard of
parcels in the post with birthday or Christmas greetings
as it appeared that gifts seemed to flow through the in a home build, real plugin
customs clearing process and seemed more likely to be printed circuit boards totally
exempted from the dreaded duty payment if they calibrated so the one could actually measure things
exceeded a relatively low value, obviously this little accurately and best of all the exact same tube that I
scheme would only work for so long but we had a already possessed and with luck I could also extract all of
reasonable number of new names for birthdays and the voltages required from the transformer, this was
taking in postal time spans 12 months disappeared quite published over a period of six or seven issues so that
quickly, due to this little lark I was now the proud owner of there was a great deal of anticipation for next month’s
a Futaba J series all sing & dancing radio & a number of edition, as well as the latest instalment that frequently
OS FSR engines, how could life get any better! offered a list of corrections from last month’s edition, it
didn’t always pay to rush in too fast.
Another of the group had begun taking an interest in large
models and as I was the guy who was a bit mechanical By this time I was fairly proficient at the manufacture of
and had access to facilities I was then pressed into the PC boards so that was undertaken without too much
business of removing un-necessary parts from acquired drama, a case was bent up to the specs required,
chainsaws a process that saw us busy after hours cutting, transistors integrated circuits and all of the other bits and
turning and adapting often slightly old and dodgy bobs hardware etc. gathered from both national and
chainsaw motors, this particular friend also knew international and sources my photographic work
somebody with die cutting ability and quickly amassed colleague through some mysterious process was able to
sufficient die cut corrugated cardboard ribs to build a generate a very professional looking front faceplate and
twice size super sixty specifically for a repurposed presto I was in business, as anyone who has ever delved
chainsaw motor , first flights were something of great into an electronic project of any sort knows trouble
amusement as for whatever reason the juggernaut shooting is where you actually get to understand how the
certainly flew but showed not the slightest desire to turn in damm thing works and I was certainly no exception to that
any direction, an after flight post-mortem laid the blame rule. However finally it worked did everything it was
squarely at the feet of the builder’s lack of dihedral, supposed to and did it better than a number of the
strangely I have no clear recollection of other flights but sceptics of the time predicted.
certainly the boulders enthusiasm for large models
continued with lots of further chainsaw mods, importation I used that machine for a lot of years until finally replacing
of genuine Quadra engines & for the day very 16-18 and it with a used professional device, nowadays of course a
20inch large props. low end to middle of the road scope is available for very
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