By SAM LOW

Dick Everett is a polymath. He’s a sailor, an inventor, a restorer of antique houses and steam engines. He can build a boat, blacksmith almost anything, and he fashions parts for model airplanes to tolerances that would split a human hair many times. He’s a longtime member of the Society of Antique Modelers and has built model airplanes for national and international competition most of his life.

When he was born in 1930, “There was not a kid who didn‘t make model airplanes. It was a time when airplanes seemed to rule the world. Lindbergh had made his flight (in 1927) and Amelia Earhart was in the news.”

He was seven years old when he began making models and competing and he continued almost every year with a few time-outs to work on land speed record machines that ran at Bonneville, or midget racers that thundered around tracks all over the U.S. and also build a boat or two.

During the second week of August, he spent a week or so at Pam Benjamin’s Sense of Wonder camp, working with campers to study aerodynamics by building and flying model airplanes.

Launching these models is an art in itself. The angle of launch has to be just so — the attitude of the plane to the wind — and the presence of an updraft, a thermal, is highly desirable. “Some competitors at the top level have electric thermal sniffers to tell them when the wind is good for launching,” he says. “My wife cuts my hair short so I can feel the thermals.”

He has competed too many times to remember, often in the P30 class, AMA — Academy of Model Aeronautics — which requires the plane have a 30-inch wing length and be 30 inches long and no more than five inches high. “They have a box with an interior dimension of 30 by 30 by five inches. They put the model in the box and shut the lid,” he says. It must weigh a minimum of 40 grams without the rubber band and the rubber band must weigh at least 10 grams.

Contest awards are often plaques made of gold, silver and bronze for first, second and third place. “I have hundreds of gold ones,” Dick says, “I have so many I just keep them in plastic bags. I don’t want to mount them all.”

Some of the models are equipped with fuses which burn down and release a rubber band which tilts the wing or the tail assembly so the model stalls and floats gently back to earth.

In the ensuing years since 1937 when Dick began flying, real estate development has taken a toll. When Dick was a kid there were plenty of open fields where he could fly his models. Now they’re all someone’s back yard. “I have to drive three hours to find a good field,” he says.

In the winter he flies indoors. Dick’s favorite place is a hanger in Lakehurst, N.J., known as Hanger One. Its interior dimensions are: 800 feet long by 250 feet wide and 80 feet high and it was home to the famous Zeppelin Hindenburg during stopovers between trans-Atlantic flights. “It’s so large that sometimes there are thunderstorms in there,” Dick says. He set the Martha’s Vineyard indoor free-flight record with a flight at the Tennis Club using a Hanger Rat model airplane.

He loves to teach young people how to build models. It’s a way to give them hands-on experience in design and engineering.

“It’s hard to get kids interested in modeling today,” he says. “They want to throw a ball or play with their cell phones. There’s more to life than poking a little electric box shining in your face.”