When my son was 4 in 71 I think I had the Vic dune buggy. I converted it to RC but somehow it only made left turns. We ran it a few times in parking lot. In 65-66 at Newport RI navy base pier I that the PT 19 cox. It actually worked on control line for three circles. On 4 th I tried landing. Well it landed but lost prop n cracked a little on body. The concrete pier my ship Theo had a few observers. Later I got into RC and had better landing skills. Yes the fuel smell and hard starting of the .049’s. Graduated to 35 n 50 sized which was easy with electric starter.

Remember this WenMac guy?!!!! To hell with the tether, just be prepared to climb a tree even if you were in an empty field. He'd always find the nearest tree!
🤣🤣🤣

This brings back memories of my experiences with Cox BabeBee 049 engines in my school days.

Unfortunately I never had one on a tethered car (I would have loved that), so mine were either fitted into control line aircraft (such as the Phantom Mite) or a balsa construction swamp buggy that myself and a friend used to enjoy running on the pond in our local park.

Just starting and running the engine screwed onto a piece of wood fixed onto an old orange box was also a childhood pleasure!

I can still remember the smell of the Nitrex 15 when I think about running my BabeBee engines.

Happy days………..

Bob.

Jump,
the red car pre-dated the Cox Bees and Tee Dees.
It was about 1948 or there about and was about a .19.

In answer to Lew’s question, Cox made .010, .020, .049, .051, .09 and .15 motors. Some were reed valve and others rotary valve. They made various versions of these.
They made some others like the Cloud Hopper but nearly 60 years has somewhat clouded my recollections.
😂
I have a collection of motors ranging from .010 to 50cc, glow and petrol. Some date back to the 1930s and I have the points and coils to run them as spark ignition. Some are marine water cooled motors.

If you are interested I can start a new post on post pictures of my motors.

In the early 1960s i went thru a succession of BabeBee .o49. Cox also made a .020 with integral tank/firewall-mount. The Cox .010 was beam-mount,required a separate fuel tank. The Cox GoldenBee 049 had a slightly larger integral tank than the BabeBee so wud run abt 5min compared with the BabeBee running 3min. Several of the Cox ready-to-fly plastic controlline planes had 049 engines with dual ports machined into the cylinder walls, they produced more power than the BabeBee but were not sold as separate powerplants under a different model name.
Then i discovered "women" & control-line flying took a backseat.......

I had one as well, but in a control line plane. First one to whack my finger.
Lew

The Baby Bee was .049. I can still hear the scream!
😉
👍

Was the Cox an .020 or .049? I remember having an .049.

Lew

Sorry, EdW, I didn't read your last message, I think I understood. Did you use the engine from that little red car?

Hi EdW, sorry but what does "Cox Baby Bee" mean?

Ed! I remember the dragster quite well! I picked up a dragster and a funny car years back for pure nostalgia. I still have them.
In the old days I remember nailing the wire into the street with masonry nails and having the dragster run down the wire like mad and hoping the parachute actuator would actually work… That’s if we could get the engines going. Which was always a bit tricky. We kinda enjoyed the challenge. After a while if we could get the engine running properly we used to let them just run wild without the tether string. A bit too destructive, then Hot Wherls came along and we went bonkers for those!
Ah, to be a kid again! But, I guess we’re still just big kids… And that’s why we’re here!
😊

Hi Jump
I have a few on my fingers as well, I used to run a Baby Bee holding it in my hand, not very safety aware.🤣
I had a Cox Dragster as well.
My father had a Cox Thimbledrome tethered car this disappeared after his passing like a lot of other things.
I remember running it on a few occasions on a disused part of an airfield near where I grew up.

It was much like the car in the picture.

H!!! It's been a while. Sorry to read about your uncle. The freighter he left you will be a source of good memories and an inspiration. Send pix when you can.

Ed! Still have a scar on my right hand from a Cox Baby Bee prop tether rod!!!! And here it is...all restored. My late father Don, kept a few of my old toys for me, Bless Him.
👍😊

The first boat I built with help from my father was a Sterling Chris Craft Buccaneer. Not RC but tethered running with a Cox Baby Bee.

My uncle n I both did the Sterling freighter. I lost mine in house fire. My uncle passed a couple months ago. I will be driving to his home and take the ship n more stuff as he wished me to soon. I built the freighter twice n Missouri once in my long life. I loved building them. If I had to do again I’d use more modern glues, fiberglass n paints. Lots of hull saw dust work!

Done properly the Missouri can be a pretty awesome kit. It’s a mountain of work and not unusual to see guys spend a year building it. Years back someone cast the hull and knocked out fiberglass blanks to speed up the r/c to process. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were guys taking the same scale Trumpeter 1:200 plastic kit and interchanging parts with the Sterling wooden kit.
Whatever floats their boat I guess. Forgive the pun!
Right now they’re about seven or eight Missouri kits on eBay that can be had for $200 and under. I guess the sellers and buyers realize the commitment it takes to build it and do it well.
I must admit my C-2 freighter has been a definite joy and a misery at the same time, but the rewards make up for the misery!
😉

One of the members of our club (SSMBC), has looked , found and built two Sterling models in recent years. One is the freighter and the other it battleship USS Missouri. He had to seach wide and long to get two models he enjoyed building. Not so much for the materials, but the construction and details.

Lew

And as for the value of full size plans, I think this picture of my Sterling C-2 Freighter "Pacific Trader" just about sums up the value of such plans!
👍👍👍

PS: If any of you were wondering...I am saving the rigging work for the cold of winter.
😉

Amen to that Lew! Despite the die-crushing I love the two Sterling ships I have now. Lost the Emma in a house fire in ‘09. She goes for big $$ nowadays if you can find her.
👍🏻

Aha, Sterling models, the old days of model boats! (I built their Emma C. Berry, simple but nice and full sized plans.)

Now everyone seems to be downsizing instructions to the point of often a magnifying 🔎 glass is needed.

Models that involve wood which often has to be cut to size should have full size plans.

Lew

Hi cashrc if you look on my harbour you can see more detail and information on the sloop Gracia, I agree and she is my favourite sailing boat.
thanks for the comment
Roy

Hi all, I have a near completed Dumas American Beauty towboat. The wood is really bad and the fittings all cast metal, some of them were just blobs!

I made my own underwater parts took nearly a week on and off but the Dumas price was just too much.
Some years ago a friend bought a Barrelback speed boat he was new to building model boats and I showed him what all the parts were for against the plans. Never heard any more, it was pretty awful.
But they are still here!
Roy

As a youngster I built both Sterling and Dumas kits.
Sterling provided great quality materials on excellent instructions/drawings
Dumas you had to use a lot of the wood as templates to make decent parts and the drawings left a lot to be desired.

Hear ya’ Lew. I have issues with Dumas plans, especially when they refuse to buy paper big enough for “full size” plans. I have one of their Coast Guard kits and the drawings are barely half the size of the actual build! It aggravates the piss out of me. If the old gang at Sterling can do it I don’t see why Dumas can’t!
I hope to build their “tuna clipper” or their Great Lakes freighter some day. But. I will inquire about the plans first!

Roy…DUDE!! That’s a sweet sloop. You did a heckuva job on her. Salute!!🫡

Lee, from what I gather Bancroft is the distributor for KYmodels outside of China. I looked at the Bancroft Düsseldorf on the MotionRC website, it looks good but not 1300.00 dollars good.
When I used to fly I tried a few ARF rc planes, and they were by and large built well and flew well, but I always traded them off. Can’t get into a model that I don’t have some time in it. Running my boats with my friends is my idea of socializing, building alone at the bench with just me, the model and my thoughts is my therapy.
Caah

My experience with Graupner and Krick/Robbe are based on a boat from each, the Wiesel (142A version) and the Dusseldorf FLB, respectively.

Plans for both were sufficient to build them, especially when I was able to get an English translation booklet for the Wiesel.

The big problem is the large amount in errors in both. I don't mean a few nitpicking hand full of errors, but many quite noticeable ones. So many that I would not refer to them as "scale models" but as "standoff scale".

It would have been easier to build the right from scratch if I had good plans. I did get a pretty good set for the Wiesel (Zobel klasse 142A) that would make a nice build especially in a larger scale. Too late for that.

Now that the Dusseldorf FLB is available as a RTR, where is it being assembled?

Lew

The folks at Krick were just as surprised as you when the found the plans and patterns they got from Robbe made no sense and were haphazard as all get out. I suspect Graupner got sloppy in the end too.
So, it's not your fault!
😉😂

BTW: Gorgeous boat ROY!!!!
😍

Hi following on with the thread, about 20 years back I had a battered Graupner Gracia hull and asked Graupner if they had the plans (2107) Yes they had and I bought them. Come the day and found that 2107 was now a plastic ARTR boat.

I got back to them and asked them about the earlier kits, she had no knowledge. Like they say suddenly out of the blue I had 2 sets of plans and I contacted Graupner again and asked if they would like a set of their own plans, I got a Yes but no response afterwards.

A few weeks later they stopped trading, sorry about that but I am not sure it was all my fault though!
Roy

Agree Cash! I understand Krick owns both the Robbe and Graupner patterns nowadays.
In fact I had to write Krick to inquire about a plan set for a super nice Robbe Topkapi Cabin Cruiser, pictured below. I found one NIB from a nice guy not too far from me. But, alas Krick told me that Robbe had this nasty habit or reusing model ID numbers over and over again and tossing old paperwork into the bin and any spares or molds “might” stored away…who knows where. I was shocked to hear that from the guy at Krick as the Topkapi kit is really well thought out and pretty damn sharp.
I posted on one of the huge RC model site forums asking for a set of instructions and plans, but got brushed off by some old salt that basically said if I had any experience at all I could figure it out!
He is right, but I got out of that blog before I called him what a miserable bastard he was.
😂😂😂

Forgot to add that Krick is reproducing some of the Robbe line under the name ROMarin. They’re good kits. Wish someone would do that with Graupner, but I have the feeling KYmodels has the rights now.
Cash

I truly miss Graupner and Robbe. They were well thought out kits with decent to really good instructions and nice plans. When they went tango uniform the first time they sent their production to China, KYmodels I think. I’ve built a few of the Asian Graupner kits, the parts are good, laser cut parts are good, fittings are nice. But the early KY kits had horrendous “instructions “. They got better over a short period of time, then Graupner, as far as kit production, folded for good. Same for Robbe, I miss them as well. I didn’t get into scale type boats until 8 or 9 years ago, but I built some go-fast sport boats from both manufacturers. When I was stationed at Ramstein Air Base from late 88 to 92. I mostly flew RC then, and raced cars (we had a decent RC track on base, I campaigned a Kyosho Lazer ZX in 4WD).
The German boat kits were great, but the airplane kits where way overbuilt IMHO. I helped a buddy build a Robbe Parat, a sport trainer on 3 channels. I must have tossed a 1/4 pound of wood from that kit. My buddy learned to fly with it, and later on he thermaled it. Nice plane.
I sometimes wish I had gotten involved in scale rc boats back then..😁
Cash

Actually, wood may be my favorite, but, as you all know, I won’t say no to the occasional abs, plastic, or even 3D print.
😉

100% with you Guys. Wood rules!!! Here's my C-2 Freighter and my beloved Lumba Lumba under construction. The smell of CA in morning...smells like victory!
😂👍🤣

I agree with Ed. There is more 'character' in a wooden hull especially plank on frame, very satisfying.
Then of course many of us that prefer wood were also instructed at school in the art of woodwork. The smell of Horses hoof glue is something else!😋

Each to his own of course and one has to admit the hull will probably be more accurate made of styrene or plastic. I was finishing a plastic hull on one occasion and a drop of 'cement' inadvertantly fell on the hull and went straight through it leaving a hole!

regards
Roy

Back in the day I occasionally reviewed kits for a magazine and Kyosho and Graupner where way the best put together and presented kits.
As an aside I was told by the magazine editor that the head of Graupner visited Deans Marine kits and commented 'no competition there'.
However Graupner virtually ceased trading a while back, but Ron Dean is still there!
Sorry I should have added Robbe as well.

Roy

These kits sorted the “men from the boys” as far more skill was required. Fortunately there are still some that still use sandwich construction and plank on frame that keep the skills around. I have got nothing against grp and vac formed hulls, use them myself, but complete off the shelf boats do obviate the need for traditional skills