If it isn’t fixed, break it.

Two halves of the same thing

Do you know what it is yet? Or – and tense is important here – what it was. The photo below is more than a bit of a clue.

Luna 2

Yes that was my favourite/latest/fastest/most fun to fly toy glider. And having not had the chance to stand on a hillside freezing my cods off for a month or so, I felt this weekend was an ideal time for a bit of sloping therapy.

Didn’t fancy riding because my knee hurt a lot. Ironically it hurt more after trudging up a lumpy, tussocked approach to a not terribly windy edge. The pain in my knee however was subsumed by the dent to my pride, after bits of once expensive moulded glider cartwheeled across the ground.

It’s hard to say what happened. Well, no that’s not true. It’s very easy to say what happened – the model fell out of the sky from around fifteen feet in an entirely vertical direction, and ploughed into the ground with all the finesse and elegance of a piledriver.

What’s not so easy to understand is why. Let’s go with pilot error and leave it at that. Not far behind in the “uh? what?” stakes is how the hell I’m going to fix it. The broken bit up there is in the middle of the fuselage. Moving forward, where the wing used to sit is just shards of glass fibre, and the wings themselves are missing the pieces which were ripped out on impact.

It’s possibly repairable. Even by me. Whether I have the time/inclination/ability to survive mainlining horrible gluing compounds is something else.

The irony of not going riding because of a broken knee wasn’t entirely lost on me. So the next day I decided to see exactly how broken it was by subjecting the bugger to a bit of early morning MTB action. Result of which is I am still walking, but more of that later.

For Christmas, I’d like some less stupid hobbies, twice as much time and a titanium knee insert.

6 thoughts on “If it isn’t fixed, break it.

  1. David

    Hmm before I scrolled down I saw a big crack in something orange…… oh dear is it a theme to plague you 🙂 can you get warranty replacement, or do I mean crash replacement? what you need is a win win so rest that knee as you ‘park’ yourself on stool and get the sticking plaster out…

  2. The hours I spent as a child, trudging up to the hills clutching my mates glider (that’s not a euphanism), lobbing it off a hill, watching it crash and then trudging all the way back to repair it, totally put me off ever having a glider ever again.

  3. Alex

    I dunno, I go away for a week and come back to find people still read my rubbish. Except for my Mum, I know she does, but I think that’s just parental pity 😉

    I have two of those stools. Great for sitting on and drinking beer. I did consider the park tools manual but felt it would be of less use than buying another mallet.

    David – my new Orange is lovely thank you. Entirely unbendy and unbroken. It’s not a trek you know 😉

    Jon – yes I am feeling a bit that way myself, but at least when you crash gliders, it only hurts you in the wallet, not anywhere painful like everytime I crash an MTB.

    Mum – I think you’ll find all my stuff is – when do we call it at work – “value engineered”. I’ve no idea what it means but it sounds better than “pointless and expensive”

  4. Pingback: This could go two ways… - I want my life back

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