Christchurch and District Model Flying Club
 

THE BIMBO MEETING 2012

Clive Spencer’s Grumman Albatross from a plan by Ivan Pettigrew, seen at a recent Club night.

I’m sure most Club members know that the BIMBO fliers are a small group who share an interest in building from designs by a New Zealander living in Canada by the name of Ivan Pettigrew (hence British Ivan’s Model Builders Organisation). They had a meeting down here in September.

Here’s a worm’s eye view of what went on.

I arrived at SF fairly early as Terry had asked me to set up and manage the flying.

What met me was most organisers’ nightmare, but fortunately the actual digger departed fairly quickly, leaving a ragged surface right in the middle of the mown circle. Most people seemed not to mind, and the pits rapidly filled up with a large variety of models including three immaculately built and prepared IP plan DH88 Comets.  First IP plane in the air was a DH Mosquito built and flown by “Pentaxman,” (Andy)

 closely followed by Scott Wallis and his IP Twin Otter

 and then his DRock Hurricane. Unfortunately Scott did not have the best meeting and broke both models. The Twotter was a write-off but I believe the Hurricane survived and is still flying.

The Ed flew his IP design Auster which was featured in the last Sloping Off.

Among our visitors was Arvid Havsgard from Norway, who has already built an IP Albatross and 120” span Martin Mars. Last year he brought the Albi, this year a Comet, seen above with Trevor and guest Nick Chudleigh. The markings on all three Comets were by Clubman Tim Calvert, by the way.

After two pretty good days at Strawberry Field we moved to Longham on the Sunday but had only a small weather window before it started to rain. Despite this we all managed to fly something, ranging from a maiden off-water for Andy’s IP Catalina to Arvid’s son flying my FunCub with just as much flair as he flew his Spitfire at SF.

Models at Longham L to R: Mike’s OD Islander on floats, Trevor’s IP Short Sealand, Trevor’s Brian Peckham Chorus Gull on floats, Andy’s IP Catalina and Mike’s Multiplex FunCub.

We were also visited by “eyeforwings” aka Robin Fowler, a prolific model designer and aircraft enthusiast. His models were huge, the biggest being

 the 10’ span Short Stirling (just about the most unlikely candidate for a scale model IMHO—Ed) which after much “encouragement” he taxied and did a short hop. This was a mistake as it turned out, because the complex and very long undercarriage was never designed for Strawberry Field’s bumps…

The model has been repaired and flown successfully

Many thanks to Club members for allowing the BIMBs to have their meeting at the field - we all had a really great time.

Mike

You can see Ivan’s website at http://www.ivansplans.com/

and there are a large number of photos from the weekend on the Strawberry Field page on the Club website (until the next edit change to the page, of course!

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