At least you found some use for that .049 Cox engine

Remember the Flying Saucers powered by these things? I had one and man what a miserable failure that bitch was. In the ads they showed 'em launching and then bein tethered by a piece of nylon string they came with to hover up to 50' off the ground before haulin 'em back down to the ground, hopefully before the lil fuel tank ran outta go-go juice.

With mine it never made it more than about 10' off the ground before it would suddenly just flip over and smash back down into the dirt no matter what technique my old man and I tried to get it aloft and keep it up. Since the body of the thing was made outta blown plastic with 3 wimpy lil struts that held the engine in the center after many such tent stake driving crash events one of the struts gave way and the damned thing chopped itself to pieces with the prop runnin at full tilt boogie, which ended all future non-fun to be had with this ridiculous contraption.

I also had a lil Army Recon plane that used one of the .049s but no matter what attempts we made at flyin this thing would it get and stay airborne either. Dunno, maybe we just never got the hang of workin the flaps to get it to work, but not for any lack of tries

Yakno, if I remember right, the fuel for those little suckers had quite a bit of nitromethane in it. I know they gave off an intoxicatingly sweet smell when they were runnin

Many years later when I was in my early 30s I had one of my younger cousins as a roomate and we got seriously into Tyco HO scale slot cars for a while, which was some great fun! We'd buy up complete big sets instead of just addin track since with the sets we got extra track, cars and power packs/controllers for a lot less $$. We ended up with about 20 differnt cars so we could run Indy car, NASCAR and "Street Car" classed races though the Indys with their lighter weight bodies, lower centers of gravity and wings smoked everything else when it came down to speed and cornerin!

As we were both bachelors and had pretty much no use for a dining room, we used ours as a place to set up our mammoth 4 lane wide track layouts. All in all I bet we had at least 200' of track including banked turns, a 3 layered corkscrew turn set and even had a section that ran straight up the wall to the ceilin before makin a 180 degree turn back down and into another pair of 90 degree turns before hittin our scale version of the Mullsane Straight down the front stretch. These lil suckers were sposta be capable of 1000 scale mph and I bet they did every bit of it comin down that straight that ran the length of the room. They would go by so fast there was no way of tellin what the cars actually were as they went by and the only way you could identify 'em was by the color of the blur that flew past ya!

These lil suckers were pretty ingeniously designed as they used magnets from the electric motors spaced just right so they actually magnetically stayed sucked down to the tracks power rails. These lil magnets also allowed us to use target point arrows as individual "car cranes" to retrieve our crashed cars from otherwise unreachable remote sections of the track and each driver was equipped with their own arrow for this task

The 2 most important "mods" we found were buyin sweet lil $1 a pair silicone back tires for 'em which improved their traction and cornering capabilities a ton over the sponge rubber tires they came with and then settin up an individual power pack/controller for each lane of the track.

If you ran 'em like Tyco had initially intended 'em with 1 power pack for both lanes of a typical piece of 2 lane wide track, when either car left the track and went flyin head long into the wall the other lane would then get a boosted shot of juice which would speed up the remaining car and quickly make it take flight at the next corner too.

By isolating each lane with its own power and controller it made for greatly improved racin, which we spent untold hours doin along with all our buddies too since there was always an extra pair of lanes available with our 4 lane wide layout.

Like the old sayin goes "The bigger the kid, the bigger the toys"