7 Responses to “Glow Engine”

1. wtfah67
   October 14th, 2010 @ 5:51 am

   yep you bet and cheaper than an ap head

2. Erik O H Johansson
   December 26th, 2010 @ 7:32 am

   Hej Lars et al,

   Now, now, my good friend. How can anyone even think of a more beautiful aircraft than the Hawker Hunter? It was, most certainly, the pilot's as well as the mechanic's aircraft. We all loved our Hunters, at least we did at F8.

   Then again, the taste, like your behind, is split in two and thank God for that. If we all liked and thought the same would we not live in a very boring world.

   I was licensed and worked on the Hunter as well as the Lansen. From the mechanic's point of view the Lansen and the Hunter are in two quite separate classes. If I remember correctly the Lansen was designed around a Swedish designed jet engine that never came off the drawing board. Instead a RR Avon was installed with the result that all the inspection doors for the various engine adjustment points were in the wrong place. To work on the engine you should preferably have arms like an octopus. The Lansen was, quite simply not a very easy aeroplane to work.

   And about flying DC3s. When I worked for Internord and by the time we operated the Convair 990A, another very beautiful aeroplane, we had a small problem. Arriving from some warm destination in the south of Europe we landed at Malmo where the majority of the passengers disembarked. It was not cost effective to fly an almost empty 990Afrom Malmo to Arlanda. We solved this situation by leasing in a DC3 from, I can not remember, whenever the DC3 was big enough to take all the remaining passengers. Our concern was, how would our guest take it being, first flown in a Convair 9900A and then carry on in a DC3? We should not have worried about that. The passenger comments were very positive as they felt that they did that last leg in 'their private' aircraft. Add to that that one can see the landscape below you so much better.

   Which reminds me of when Internord and Transair operated DC7s. Transair also operated DC6s. In those days I worked as a Flight Watch Officer for Internord in Copenhagen. What bothered me was that, as mentioned above, we arrived from the south with a full load, left the majority of the pax in Malmo and then flew half empty to Bromma. That was one 'bad' flight in the evening and another 'bad' flight in the morning flying Bromma to Malmo. One late afternoon I called my counterpart at Transair asking him how many pax he had from Malmo to Bromma. Oh boy, I could easily take them to Bromma in our machine. And Bromma to Malmo the following morning? Same thing. So I suggested that I would take Transair's pax in my machine to Bromma and from Bromma to Malmo the following morning at no charge. Deal done. The following afternoon we did the same deal except Transair took my pax to Bromma and from Bromma to Malmo the following morning. Absolutely smashing. It saved us and Transair a Malmo – Bromma – Malmo flight every day. And so we went on. Until one day my then boss Ulf Engelbrecht called me in to his office. He had the Swedish SLV (isn't that what they were called in those days?) on the phone. Ulf asked me if I was responsible for these most illegal sub-charters. I nodded. Ulf, still with the SLV official on the line, gave me a right old rocket and fired me on the spot. With the phone call over Ulf re-hired me and thanked me for the good job I had done.

   Says Erik who thinks that life in 'those days' was wonderful and there is no aeroplane more beautiful that the Hawker Hunter.

3. darthmojo
   February 23rd, 2011 @ 8:17 pm

   Mark: What extra detail are you looking for about the post-process? What I explained in the post is really all there was:

   - Add a touch of film grain
   - Add a touch of “enlarged” chromatic grain (this gave it a hint of the mpeg compression look
   - Added glow to the engines

   I may have played with the red channel a tiny bit to make the color of the red stripe a more perfect match, but that's about all there was.

   That being said, the world of post production on CGI FX shots is often overlooked by people just getting involved. Sure, we can spit some pretty nifty stuff out of our 3D software, but final tweaks in the compositing software of your choice can make all the difference (and it can save you from needing to re-render!)

   Back in the early days of Babylon Five and even most of Voyager, we rarely did any post-processing. What came out of Lightwave is pretty much what wound up on the air (although on Star Trek, the FX supervisors would take a handfull of elements and do their own tweaks to the shots in the editing bay).

   Of course, looking back now, I can't believe we did that! Today it's standard practice to break shots out into their component elements and “create” the final shot in comp (hollywood slang for “compositing.”)

   Still, I think sometimes people go to far with the number of elements they break shots into… yes, you'll almost always get better results by building and adjusting a shot in comp, but it does take a fair amout of extra time to spit out all those elements and, of course, to do the actual comp work. A talented artist can get a shot looking VERY close to final by tweaking things within the 3D package.

   For something like a simple shot (let's say an establishing shot of the Galactica,) I daresay you'd end up with maybe a 20% improvement in the look of the final by breaking the shot out into elements and compositing, but at a cost of perhaps double the work and manhours. Is it worth it?

   If you've got unlimited time and money, sure, go for it. But on a TV schedule, it might be wise to balance things out by examining each shot and deciding – in advance – what elements are truly necessary to seperate out to get you that extra bump in quality.

   I've watched people break out a ship no larger than a postage stamp into half a dozen seperate elements, simply because it was “standard procedure.” Doing this isn't going to make an appreciable visual difference to the shot, but it is going to suck up extra time, from the 3D artist creating those elements, to the time it takes to check them, and for the compositor to load and balance them.

   Let's say that amounts to 15 minutes of extra time… no big deal, right? But when you consider that an episode of a TV show can have thousands of individual elements, the 15 minutes saved here and there by customizing a breakout will ultimately save a LOT of time – time that could be spent tweaking where it counts.

4. fox_prostate
   April 5th, 2011 @ 7:31 am

   Sorry that you lost your step dad! I’ve been in RC for a long time (I’ve got plenty of glow engine experience) so I’ll give you what I think this stuff is worth and what you should ask for it. Start on the high side (ie what I recommend), people will probably haggle you down a little bit. I might be off on some of these, but you should probably get at least 50% of the price I have here. Dago Red: $150 Alpha 60: (this plane is ready to fly and sold as a package with motor and radio, include the “Quattro” radio with it when you sell it) $250 Eagle 50 heli: include the transmitter that says Exceed RC on it: $60 Cap 232: $150 MegaStealth: $150 Unknown name plane: This is a Sportsman Aviation Excelleron 50. The canopy is missing which sucks, oh well. $250 with engine/servos. Red Flame plane: Not a clue what the hell this thing is. The engine is an AP Hornet 15. $75 T-Rex 450S: $100 Miscellaneous planes: – Yellow Bee: worthless. 5 bucks – White/blue plane: Multiplex Easystar. 60 bucks with the stuff you see in it. – “BREITLING” plane: Is this the Cap 232 you posted earlier, unboxed? If not, looks to be another one of the same. $150 – Unfinished kit-built airplane: Looks like a Great Planes Sport Stik 25 kit. 30 bucks. Parts: – First image: K&B 65 Sportster. 70 bucks if it’s new, 30 or so used. – Second image: can’t tell. The make/model is probably on the side. Start at 50 bucks? – Third/fourth image: Sachs 3.2 gasoline enigne. $75 – Images 5-7: Field box with starter (sell it all together): 30 bucks – Image 8: chargers: worthless. 5 bucks – Image 9: Cheetah mufflers: 15 bucks a piece The radios (controllers) aren’t worth much because they are so old (I wouldn’t trust them in any of my planes). 10 bucks a piece (except for the ones that you should include with the planes, as I explained earlier). You may have better luck selling this stuff at an RC auction. Go to modelaircraft.org, find a few RC clubs in your area, and call up the contacts for those clubs and ask them if they have any auctions coming up. You will probably be able to get rid of almost all of it in a day. You will probably get about as much as you would selling it online because the people who go to RC auctions are old and don’t use the internet. Good luck!

5. Don E
   May 2nd, 2011 @ 7:18 am

   Get a new one.

6. antiquekid3
   June 20th, 2011 @ 7:47 am

   A friend and I are working on getting this engine working again. However, I seem to be having trouble with the fuel mixture. The manual calls for a 3:1 mixture of white gas and SAE 70 oil. That sounds very lean to me. Most two-cycle engines require a 50:1 mixture of 2-cycle oil and gasoline. This is *not* a glow engine; it does indeed have a spark plug. Have there been enough advances in oil technology where I can use a modern-day fuel mixture like 50:1, or does this thing really require that much oil? I can hardly find any information on running these old engines since most enthusiasts seem to only use glow engines. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

7. RAN1ER11
   October 2nd, 2011 @ 10:50 pm

   listen to everybody say how its not a 1000 hp. well it seems as though everyone on youtube worked in cooperation with to sam to build this thing so by now they must be experts. FUCK ALL OF YOU. not a single person has a supporting evidence to think so.