When I was a grade schooler (early 1960s) the North Pacific Strato was a favorite. They were bigger than five or six inches and cost a nickel! They flew very very well. As balsa prices went up, North Pacific made all their models (the Strato, the 10 cent Stunt Flyer glider, the 15 cent Skeeter rubber powered plane, the 25 cent Sleek Streek rubber powered plane with wheels and the seemingly gigantic and expensive 49 cent Star Flyer) all smaller and smaller until their flying qualities diminished noticeably. Only then - many years later - did the prices start to go up.

I always liked the North Pacific models better than their competitors and, as a child in Denver, and later Santa Fe, if there really was a place called "Bend, Oregon" where these planes said they were from. Of course I can now say yes, and I've been there....but this was long after North Pacific as I remember it was gone.

I did occasionally manage to get a folding wing AJ Interceptor....a truly amazing model. I may have, somewhere, a remade AJ Interceptor from when the late Frank Macy tried to revive American Junior....he used to come to the now defunct Northwest Model Expo in Puyallup, Washington in February.....

Ah the memories....

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Bernard Cawley
NAR 89040 L1 - Life Member
SAM 0061
AMA 42160
KG7AIE

Indeed. Yes, Bend, Oregon and Penrose, Colorado were both mysterious places to me at that tender age, because I knew of no other products that were made in them. In my child's imagination, I pictured them as being perhaps slightly "Willy Wonka-esque" company towns, which existed for no other purpose--although I could *never* envision Vern Estes dressed the way Gene Wilder was in the 1971 movie... :-) Also:

In addition to their gliders and rubber-powered model airplanes, I once had one of North Pacific's odd "Whirl-E-Bird" adjustable boomerangs (see: http://www.flight-toys.com/boomeran...table/tb53.html ); it consisted of two flat, constant-chord hardwood wings (which were stained or painted yellow), which had beveled leading and trailing edges to create the airfoil shape. One wing had a red plastic sleeve clip cemented to one end, through which the other wing could be slid (it was a tight friction-fit) to adjust the boomerang's flight characteristics. Well:

It flew okay, but unlike the Wham-O traditional Australian style red plastic boomerang that I also had (the new reproductions of it are much lighter and don't fly as well), the "Whirl-E-Bird" never came all the way back to me, no matter how much I adjusted it. One day, when I was flying it in a hilltop cemetary a few hundred feet from our house near Young Harris, Georgia, it flew in front of the Sun and I lost track of it. As I was walking around the graveyard looking for it (I had noticed a fresh open grave), a funeral procession drove up! I got some strange looks as I kept walking around between the tombstones, looking back and forth along the ground. After covering a grid pattern over the whole hilltop, I finally gave up, knowing it must have landed in a nearby thicket, which I wasn't about to look in because it was just the kind of place where venomous snakes would hang around...

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Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperba...an-form/8075185
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6122050
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6126511
All of my book proceeds go to the Northcote Heavy Horse Centre www.northcotehorses.com.
NAR #54895 SR

For those interested in North Pacific Sleek Streak, here ya go!

http://www.nosf.ca/docs/heykid1.pdf

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If it flies, I can crash it!

My Florio Flyer XP-1 Rocket Plane.

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If it flies, I can crash it!

I remember that series of articles. It was published in the late great Model Builder magazine quite some time ago (back when you could easily go buy a Sleek Streek).

Whoever scanned it clipped off the tops and bottoms of the pages so you couldn't see the source info.

Poking around on the net with the magazine in mind led to this: http://digitekbooks.com/index.php/m...collection.html

I have an almost complete physical collection of MB, but this is very very tempting.

__________________
Bernard Cawley
NAR 89040 L1 - Life Member
SAM 0061
AMA 42160
KG7AIE

MAKE Magazine published a nice piece about the flip-wing catapult plane. I seem to recall that someone is selling kits again.

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NAR #27085 - Oregon Rocketry - SAM

http://www.modelairplanepages.com/a...x/aj-index.html
is a website devoted to making your own Jim Walker Interceptor Clone. Never could afford one of these when I was a pup (I believe they were 50 cents and the "74" gliders were 10 cents at that time. There was always a vendor in the parking lot at Lambert Field in St. Louis at that time.

This is the folding wing glider in my mind.

Enjoy,
Ed

Thank you for posting this. This folding-wing concept should work for boost-gliders (B/Gs) and Rocket Gliders (RGs). It should make possible B/Gs and RGs with longer, narrower, sailplane-type wings, so that they would have lower sink rates (shorter wings could be used to make "foul-weather" B/Gs and RGs). For "fair-weather" models with longer wings, the trailing folded wings (in the powered ascent configuration) would give the models trailing-stick stability like a skyrocket's.

__________________
Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperba...an-form/8075185
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6122050
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6126511
All of my book proceeds go to the Northcote Heavy Horse Centre www.northcotehorses.com.
NAR #54895 SR

Ahhh the memories. When I think about all the rubber band planes, gliders and kites I bought when I was a kid(I still am). It still amazes and tickles me on where I got the money to buy these treasures. My mother would yell at me asking where I got the money? "Mom, I told you this before!! I got the money from the local junk yard!"
There were 6 local junk yards in my end of town, three within a 1/4 mile of each other. I would spend a Saturday morning, or most any weekday during the summer, scrounging around the newly junked cars filling my pockets with loose change. On a good day I would walk out with $20.00 easy. Of the six, three are gone to development and EPA.
I wonder to think how many thousands of dollars are destroyed each year in loose change in junked cars?

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If it flies, I can crash it!

That's interesting... and the owners would let you poke around like that??

I'd be worried about taking a ride through the crusher... LOL Course maybe I watched "Goldfinger" too much too...

Later! OL JR

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