Alfred Scott

Tell us who you are, where you live, what you do....
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Alfred Scott
Posts: 272
Joined: Wed May 29, 2019 8:47 pm
Location: Richmond, VA
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Alfred Scott

Post by Alfred Scott » Sat Jun 01, 2019 4:10 pm

Back in the 1980s I started a company, Sequoia Aircraft Corporation, to sell Stelio Frati’s famous F.8L Falco as a plans- and kit-built aircraft.

I was a Speech & Drama major from the University of Virginia. I was never a good student but in my senior year I failed my junior comps as an English major twice and had to find a new major. I had already taken a Speech course only because it was a notoriously easy class. I really didn’t care about it, but it was the only major that would accept me.

Sometimes a good slap in the face is a good thing that can happen to you. My grades were so bad I was on probation. I stopped partying and started studying 18 hours a day. I kept my English courses and went from probation to Dean’s List, graduating in the summer school.

For the Falco, I needed drawings for the Falco and taught myself drafting, initially tracing the original drawings with ink on mylar, with the text pasted on with rubber cement as my handwriting was so bad I could barely read it myself.

The Falco had a lot of curves for the fuselage frames, airfoils, wing tips and fillets, cowling, etc. I bought plastic splines and duck weights to draw the curves.

When the Mac was introduced, I bought three of them, one for myself, one for my wife and one for our two daughters, who still use Macs to this day.

I wanted to be able to do my drawings on a computer. I looked at every CAD program out there, went to computer shows and finally ended up using the early MacDraw program, then became a beta tester for MacDraw II and then ClarisCAD. As a beta tester, I got the program free, and I tried doing a full dimensioned drawing of a simple mechanical part. It was an awful experience and I was overcome with the feeling that I had been defrauded, even though the program was free! Such was the difference between my expectations of what I should be able to do and the program that was on my computer.

A friend introduced me to PowerDraw, and I soon became a beta tester. I had already done some programming for Benchmark, for aircraft performance testing and analysis, and I was involved when Engineered Software introduced the ability to create external plug-ins for tools, commands and translators.

While PowerDraw was a nice, easy program to use, I wanted to put my fist through the computer screen every five minutes. That is what drove me to create WildTools, my own set of tools and commands. The rest is history.

I’m always interested in ideas for what might go into WildTools. Recently it seems that most of the ideas are coming from Matt Arnold.

I hate personal messaging in a forum. Best to put up an idea in the forum for everyone to see.

Or email me or call me at the contact info below.

Alfred

Alfred Scott
5407 Patterson Ave, Suite 202B
Richmond
VA 23226

alfred.scott@me.com
804 353-1713
iPhone: 804 690-4591

www.seqair.com
where you will find lots on the Falco, WildTools, Benchmark and my other madnesses and obsessions.

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