12/3/10

Lazy Bee Plans

 

At work today one of my buddys ran across a Youtube clip of an RC plane zipping around New York. This got me thinking about my old RC Lazy Bee that never got to fly and how cool it would be to get another one built to try it again.

The reason I never let it leave the ground was a large fear that a kite eating tree from Charlie Brown was going to try to chomp on it or a brush patch would molest it. At the time I built it in 2000 or so I was still fairly young and didn’t have a job yet. That plane had a lot of my highschool savings wrapped up in it and was going to stay in one piece in my room safe and sound. And for that reason its still collecting dust, its poor little Trexler ballon wheels have rotted and cracked from setting so long. But after seeing that video above I really wanted to get another one as a test mule and send it in the sky. But that excitment was short lived when I looked around online and could not find any of the old Lazy Bee’s anywhere. For what ever reason I was really bummed about that. After jumping from a couple forum posts and message boards I found a post on Global Hobby that seems explains what happend to the partnership. There are no kits, no plans, and no planes left to sell. Theres a still a small cache of old kits that survived that turn up on Ebay from time to time but nothing you could just go and buy. For this reason the folks at RC Groups.com had started a thread on preserving and creating new Lazy Bee’s and the other planes from Clancy Avation.

Here is a zipped folder of all the plans that were gathered from posts in that thread, 32MB’s in size (Edit 2020-link removed, see below). I take no credit for any of this work, it belongs to the good people at rcgroups.com who will not let this neat little plane or its siblings fade off in to obscurity. Here is the thread in full http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=916960 . The plans included in this zip include; Big Lazy Bee Plans, Gyro Bee Plans, Lady Bug Plans, Micro Bee Plans The Little Plane That Could plans, Speedy Bee Plans, Stagger Bee Plans, Turbo Bee Plans, Yard Bee Plans, and of course the Lazy Bee Plans with multiple wing types, and floats.

Also here are some other usefull links. The company that makes the Lazy Bee’s funny little ballon tires http://www.trexlerballoonwheel.com/  The International Lazy Bee Homepage, these guys were around when I started building mine ten years ago, still a great source of information and mods to this fun plane. Heres a Lady Bug build, it was the Lazy Bee’s smaller cousain. A Speedy Bee Review.  The old Clancy Aviation Homepage.

 

EDIT 2020!!

I am beyond happy to share that Clancy Aviation is again selling planes and kits! https://www.andyclancydesigns.com/

Head on over there an support the Bee’s and get them from their home hanger. I’ve pulled the zip with the plans in it now that you can get them direct from the source, great to see the Bee back.

05/25/10

Conan!

Went to Conan O’ Brien’s Leaglly Prohibited From Being Funny On Tv Tour, it was pure awesome on every level. Was a little bummed that Kid Rock was the special guest, I mean come on. I was hopping for Bob Seager, Michael Moore, Alice Cooper, or somebody that wasn’t Kid Rock. But it was still cool.

Reggie Watts was the opener, and man was it cool to see him live. Could of went home happy after just seeing his set.

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The bat from Meatloafs Bat out of Hell Tour! Sweet!

The whole show was just amazing beyond words, if you can catch one before Conan gets back on Tv do it.

04/22/10

Fun with Win Terminals

So last weekend the local Goodwill got all the hardware of some poor buisness that went under. There was all kinds of stuff there, hubs, switches, LCD stands, WinTerminals, rack mount parts, etc. It was crazy, like an electronic palooza of sorts. I snagged one of the WYSE clients for 9.99 and brought it to work where everyone thought it was pretty cool. Two of the guys I work with went back and loaded up on the remaning goodies and got a couple of the WYSE’s too. Heres what the little WYSE’s 9450XE’s look like.

The ones we got were running XP Embeded, and at various levels of freedom. Some allowed wrighting to their little 256mb solid state drives, while others were locked down tight. We spent more time then it was worth trying to get the WYSE device manager installed to flash them over the network, but gave up and installed laptop drives em. They have all the converter cables and power lines to run mobile IDE stuff which is awesome. Also since the little VIA’s just sip power they only pull .8 Amps to run over their little 12V AC adapters. They would make a great torrent box. But being that we can’t leave them alone we ended up installing the mobile drives, more Ram, and Windows XP Home. I put 7 on mine for a while, and while it was useable it also needed more Ram then I had. After we got them all running on XP, Travis and I started benched marked ours to see whos machine came out on top. His benchmark is with a solidstate page file and tweaked XP settings mines just stock.

Check out those numbers! YEAH!! Mine is the brain dead one thats pulling 0.00mhz. This stuff cracks me up because you know that some supper serious overclocker people are going to see ours in there. Go lil WYSE’s clients!