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AT THE END of November's "From the Ground Up" installment, we left the fuel tank filled and in the right place to ensure trouble-free operation. The tank setup is good, you already know how to set the high- and low-speed needle valves, and the proper glow plug is in place. Now you just need to get the engine started to have a great flying day—the first of many.

Modern glow engines are so user-friendly that we only need to make the glow plug glow and then find someway to rotate the engine to get it started. With today's industry and modelers' imaginations being what they are, there are roughly five million tools to perform each operation. But we need someplace to house these millions of tools.
    From 1970 to 1974, I housed all the field equipment I owned—a 2-ounce turkey baster with a fuel line attached, a 1.5-volt battery with alligator clips, a "chicken stick," and some tools—in a brown paper bag.
    However, the baster took five minutes to fuel a 16-ounce tank, the battery was always dead, the alligator leads were constantly shorting out against the engine's head fins, and the chicken stick kept breaking the wooden propellers. If everything was actually working, the bag would rip open, spilling everything onto the ground.
    I do not recommend such limited equipment to anyone, but, in truth, it is all you actually need to get flying. Luckily there are better ways today.
    It is a good idea to find a more permanent home than a paper bag for your field equipment, and many manufacturers offer "field boxes" such as the ones shown. Expect a field box to be able to hold all of the tools you will need, a gallon of fuel, a fuel pump, a glow starter, a power panel, a 12-volt battery, and an electric engine starter.
    Some field boxes, such as Great Planes' Master Caddy, are equipped to hold the aircraft during field assembly or repairs, but not for engine starts or runs. Although each field accessory, such as the Thunder Tiger fuel pump featured in the November article, can be powered from its own battery, it is more convenient for most model pilots to use one 12-volt battery to run everything through a power panel.
    Shown are a few of the many such batteries and power panels available. Most field-box batteries are 12-volt 'gel cells.' Gel cells do use common lead-acid technology, but in a different form that does not spill or require venting. Motorcycle batteries are also often used, but they must be firmly fastened in an upright position and completely vented to the outside.        

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The most popular 12-volt gel-cell battery has a capacity of 7 ampere-hours (Ah), which is more power than is required on most flying days. But sometimes a balky engine—yours or a friend's—can make excessive power demands on a field-box battery that you forgot to charge last night. For these occasions, you may find that a 9 Ah battery is ideal.
    If you connect your starter directly to the battery without a power panel, consider a system that I use for Pattern competition starts, with which only three minutes, from start to airborne, are allowed (shown). Use a heavy-duty starter (which I'll discuss later) and a 4 Ah, 12-volt battery wired in series with a 4 Ah, 6-volt gel cell.
    This setup could probably turn over a big-block V8. But make sure your engine is not flooded; this much starting power could damage an engine hydraulically locked in place with liquid fuel.
    Most electric fuel pumps use 12 volts, as do most electric starters, but the average glow plug burns out at more than 2 volts. If only one battery is used to power the field box, you must use some sort of voltage-control system. The most common is the power panel, which ranges in application and cost from inexpensive and basic to sophisticated and expensive.       

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