Florio Flyer XP-1 Glider, I had several of these in the early 90's. My son and I had a ball with these gliders. I got a hold of Jim Florio when I lived in Florida. He lived about 40 miles away from me. He sent me the body of the gilder without wings for free. That's all I needed. The glider is packed away now and I don't want to search for it in hot weather.
I found the glider online, but I can' open the plans. Can anybody else? If you do, could you email it to me, please. Thanks and enjoy!

http://makezine.com/projects/make-3...up-glides-down/

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If it flies, I can crash it!

The Hobby Lobby here has the folding foam planes that could be used.
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This post got me thinking about being a kid again. I was ALWAYS flying something, whether balsa planes, RC planes, U-Control planes, kites, homemade hot air balloons, water rockets or model rockets. I did a search of American Junior Aircraft and looked at a few sites. Those were not the planes I recall buying/flying. I kept looking and came across this site:

http://www.oldwoodtoys.com/new_page_2.htm

The brand I bought the most of was North Pacific. I'll bet many of you remember these as well. I also recall buying/flying folding wing balsa planes, but it wasn't the American Junior or North Pacific brand. I've yet to go through all the companies on the above site, so I may find it yet. Now that I know the name brand of the planes I flew, I'm going to have to see if I can find some on eBay. Tami will love that I found something else to collect. hehehe

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Scott D. Hansen
Ye Olde Rocket Shoppe - Your One Stop BAR Shoppe!
Ye Olde Rocket Plans - OOP Rocket Plans From 38 Companies!
Ye Olde Rocket Forum
WOOSH NAR Section #558

I was the same way. Always had a plane in my hand or something flying.
I got the pic's to prove it! Lol.
NP Sleek Streak was my flyer but the NP Star Flyer was the coveted choice. It was BIG! They come up on Fee-Bay every once in a while. When I talked to Jim of Florio Flyer fame, he told me to keep his price down, he would 'employ' the neighborhood kids to help make parts and pay them with a glider.

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If it flies, I can crash it!

I need to find the balsa/rubber band plane my brother gave me this last Christmas...
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At work I am "the Glider Guy". I'm always building White Wings paper planes at breaks and lunches, or going around getting everyone else's clam-shell food containers to use as material for foam gliders. I made a really nice "Estes Nighthawk" glider out of two food containers and a plastic knife. It flew a little too well and was never seen again.

Some of those old wood planes were beautiful! Makes me wanna give balsa a try.

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John Adams
"There is a lot of rocketry under 20ns"

The American Junior "Army Interceptor" folding wing balsa catapult gliders were also used as very cheap gunnery targets during World War II (see: http://www.google.com/#fp=8fd259d59...rmy+interceptor ). Also, speaking of North Pacific:

They made two swept-wing balsa chuck gliders (that I saw in stores back then--they made more than those two). One was the common chuck glider size (having a 9" or so wing span), while the other--which flew amazingly well--was *tiny*, with wings that spanned only five or six inches. This was the Strato (see: http://www.oldwoodtoys.com/north_pacific.htm ). Its moderately-swept wings had a (nearly) constant chord, and they had red ink "scalloped" patterns printed on them. If someone here still has one, it would make a great "minimum material" glider to clone, perhaps using laser-cut parts to enable quantity production.

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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

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