Our Purpose

Welcome to RCINFORMER! My name is Rich. I started this site to provide very useful, “how to” information about all things R/C. My primary focus will be on airplanes, but I plan to incorporate many facets of R/C. I have been in the hobby since the early 80’s and after nearly 30 years of R/C experience I feel an urge to promote it in my own way. The hobby has grown beyond my expectations and it keeps getting better.

In recent years I have built and flown some outstanding models manufactured overseas that if flown “out of the box” would have ended in disaster. The quality and complexity of many currently produced models have vastly exceeded my expectations. Especially foam planes. We have gone from full build kits, to wood/composite ARFs, to all foam airplanes. It is amazing to see all the things that have been done with foam models. We now can fly many different kinds of aircraft that were previously cost prohibitive, but can now be acquired at an affordable price. Many of their shortcomings come from the assembly process and marginal instructions/product support. The models themselves are mostly top notch and ultimately fly great, it is the assembly process that often falls short and leaves many parts of the model needing attention before it can be flown successfully. In no way is it my intention to bash those who assemble the models, they mostly do a great job. In fact, I am grateful to them for taking a lot of the work out of the building process and allowing us all more time to fly. Without overseas labor the hobby would not be as great as it is. I speculate that the problems we run into with our models are that the assemblers, in many cases, probably have no knowledge of airplanes or understanding of the air loads imposed on them. When we get the models, we find that some planes need only minor tweaking while others have a laundry list of things that need to be corrected before flying the model. In football terms, they get us to about the 7th or 8th yard line, we need to carry the ball the rest of the way! I have found that there are few truly “Ready To Fly” or “Receiver Ready” models. Most need some kind, if not a lot, of tweaking.

Welcome to RCINFORMER! My name is Rich. I started this site to provide very useful, “how to” information about all things R/C. My primary focus will be on airplanes, but I plan to incorporate many facets of R/C. I have been in the hobby since the early 80’s and after nearly 30 years of R/C experience I feel an urge to promote it in my own way. The hobby has grown beyond my expectations and it keeps getting better.

In recent years I have built and flown some outstanding models manufactured overseas that if flown “out of the box” would have ended in disaster. The quality and complexity of many currently produced models have vastly exceeded my expectations. Especially foam planes. We have gone from full build kits, to wood/composite ARFs, to all foam airplanes. It is amazing to see all the things that have been done with foam models. We now can fly many different kinds of aircraft that were previously cost prohibitive, but can now be acquired at an affordable price. Many of their shortcomings come from the assembly process and marginal instructions/product support. The models themselves are mostly top notch and ultimately fly great, it is the assembly process that often falls short and leaves many parts of the model needing attention before it can be flown successfully. In no way is it my intention to bash those who assemble the models, they mostly do a great job. In fact, I am grateful to them for taking a lot of the work out of the building process and allowing us all more time to fly. Without overseas labor the hobby would not be as great as it is. I speculate that the problems we run into with our models are that the assemblers, in many cases, probably have no knowledge of airplanes or understanding of the air loads imposed on them. When we get the models, we find that some planes need only minor tweaking while others have a laundry list of things that need to be corrected before flying the model. In football terms, they get us to about the 7th or 8th yard line, we need to carry the ball the rest of the way! I have found that there are few truly “Ready To Fly” or “Receiver Ready” models. Most need some kind, if not a lot, of tweaking.

Rich