One of which has been mounting and displaying those butterflies that I mentioned that I had in an earlier post... They had mostly been stored in boxes for a few years, but I got them out and made glass box-frames for the ones that didnt have them, and now they are on the wall...
And on a different but related project, I selected a mere two dozen pictures from my assorted travels and advenures for display... I have several thousand pictures to choose from and in fact thats been the problem; There are so many that I hardly know how to go about selecting ones to frame! In the end I decided to mostly just go with pictures that have me in them and are reasonably well composed of some place I went and doing something I enjoyed... And that just left a couple of hundred to select from :) So then I went with the "just get it over with" approach and did a quick rough selection of two dozen to put on the wall and didnt bother agonising over the choices of which ones to leave out..., I got prints made, and then I mounted, framed, and hung those on another wall. So now my walls are less bare :)
And now thats done, I dont have those jobs lingering in the back of my mind any more... Quite a relief since Ive been meaning to do them for quite a few years :))
And on yet another front, I made a spontaneous ebay purchase a few weeks ago of a radio controlled model airplane... Like I say, Ive been building model planes since I was a kid and I come back to it time and again through the years, and it never seems to "get old" for me... I just get lots of enjoyment out of it... :)
Anyway, this one is pretty much fully pre-built and the fun of it is in the flying. Its a model Spitfire (One of the most elegant aircraft designs ever to fly in my opinion) and its made of poly-styrene foam with an electric engine and powered by a Litium battery. Its about 80cm wing span (good size) and also has the option for retracting undercariage, so I of course had to install that - Ive always wanted that feature! :)
And Ive been flying it on occasion after work and on weekends at a nearby playing field... Its virtually silent and doesn't bother anyone.
But the playing field is a bit small for my liking and , well,... there have been a few "incidents"!
Its been quite a few years since I flew a model plane and im aquite "rusty" so to speak. So initially I just did little "test hops" a few feet off the ground and then cut the power and landed immediately. But soon enough I got fully airborn and found that even though its a "low wing aileron model" and quite airobatic, its also been very well designed and flys with very nice "manners"... Quite docile in my out of date hands :))
But it seems my "depth perception" is not what it should be and I mannaged to fly it through a tree while on my final approach and that ripped the tail off and broke the propeller.... So I glued it back together... And then there were a couple of quite rough landings on windless days cos there is not really quite enough room as I said, and that broke the undercarriage... which I then fixed. And then the motor has "cut out" on me twice (probably due to over-heating) which has resulted in one crash into a power line which broke a wing and another crash into a tall tree which broke the tail again (and required me to walk for over a kilometer with a long ladder over my shoulder in order to get it out of the tree!).
So, the model has taken a few beatings, but I keep patching it back up and flying it again... Im definitely getting my moneys worth out of it :)))
