Office of Steam Forum for Model & Toy Steam Gas & Hot Air Engines
The Regular Stuff: Chat, Buy, Sell, Off Topic, etc. => Off Topic => Topic started by: Adirondack Jack on April 24, 2022, 08:52:04 am
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Many years ago, when the millennium was just a future concept, I wrote an essay that appeared in RCModeller magazine, attempting to explain the addictive quality of building and flying RC airplanes. “Wizards or Wingnuts?”, as the name implied, was the rare philosophical essay in a tech heavy geek magazine. Central among the concepts presented, was the idea that there are myriad challenges presented in modeling, perhaps especially in the live action kind, be it radio controlled airplanes, or steam engines big enough to ride, or stationary engine installations. If it can warp, crack, leak, present with factory defects, or decay from disuse, the miniature is not exempt, but in some instances more susceptible than the full sized standard. And yet, this is part of what makes it what it is.
If you lack imagination, you need only hold a tiny OS four stroke in your hand to hear it run. Gaze upon the sticks and wires of a Sopwith Pup, you’ll smell the oiled breeze of open cockpit flight in a plane with a thru-oiled engine. Lack patience? The last few days of a project, as paints dry and reassembled engines pass their oil full leak checks, as powerful forces within demand immediate assembly and running our creations, when the linseed oil needs just one more day, and your better angels wish for all the wiring dressed and trim secured before that first start, knowing motivation will shift at the sound of operational success.
Our hobbies give us what we need, and what we need is often the “hard parts” endured to get to the dangled carrot of “I made that.” Well of course you made that. And even you didn’t know you were capable of following every single step, in order, all the way to the end of the manual…. You are when you want something bad enough.