NAMBA Goes I.T. With Dave
By David Santistevan
NAMBA Internet Technology Chairman
Happy Holidays to everyone
and I hope your Winter build
projects are going well. NAMBA
President Robert asked me to
share a little bit about myself, so
I will try to keep it brief.
I am from Littleton, Colorado
and I have been married to
Valerie for thirty one years. We
have three kids, all grown up and
finished with college so I have
more time on my hands than I
should. I am an IT guy by trade
and own my IT services company
that provides network admin-
istration services and cloud computing services. I have been doing
this my entire life so I have seen some changes for sure and I know a
little bit about this stuff.
I started model boating in 1978 when I was eighteen years old and
raced competitively for about three years. I got married and moved
on to my new priorities. Now that the kids were gone I decided to get
back in to model boats. It was never really out of my blood and I
knew I would take it up again someday.
I got back into boating in 2011 with my primary love being
outboard tunnel hulls. I am currently racing my .21 stock tunnel and
a .45 Eagle outrigger. And I have just completed a gas tunnel. I hope
to have a Classic Thunderboat and a .21 mono built for this next
season. During the time raising kids, I flew model helicopters for
over ten years. One of the most important achievements in model
helicopters is to reach an ability to bring your bird back in one piece
each time you fly. Fortunately I was able to get at least that far.
I attended my first NAMBA Nationals this year in Salt Lake City,
Utah where I met many of you. This hobby is truly my love with the
awesome people I have met and made my friends. I will be attending
the Nationals in 2014 in Seattle so I am hoping to see you there. If
you have any questions, suggestions or would like to just chat, I have
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PROPWASH
April 2014
13
There are several reasons for these results. By limiting
ourselves to an engine that was set up for best perform-
ance on regular gasoline, we did not take advantage of the
various fuels best properties. We should have run a higher
compression ratio and adjusted the ignition timing. Most
importantly, we should have run a pipe tuned to the lower
exhaust temperature. All this testing shows that no one
factor alone determines an engine’s performance.
The final issue is engine design. Running conventional
ringed piston engines that were designed for gasoline will
not cause problems when run on lower temperature
methanol and nitro based fuels. They will need different
pipes and head buttons. Our experiences with gasoline in
engines with AAC piston and sleeve construction were not
good. I am not aware of engines with much over a 25 mm
bore that run even low temperature fuels. The CMB 35
with AAC construction was a giant failure. We never were
able to run it at full throttle without seizing. We even
seized a ringed piston where the sleeve was out of round
above the exhaust port. I would be surprised if 15 cc or
even smaller nitro engines that do not use ringed
construction would run on gasoline. They probably would
be fine with spark ignition on normal nitro fuel.
Allowing spark and glow ignition to run together in the
NAMBA X or IMPBA F class would be a fun experiment.
I think modern advances in spark ignition systems have
somewhat overcome the simplicity advantage of glow
ignitions. Greater control of ignition timing should be an
advantage. Racing fuels or nitrous oxide in gasoline type
engines would also be interesting. The only way to find
out is by racing the two styles of engines together.