Each month we sit down and interview one of our fellow boaters. This month we have with us the owner and primary maintainer of IWR/C, Andy Hartz. In this interview, Andy tells us a little about how he got into R/C models and how this page got started. Also, he answers all those questions about him that you've always wanted to know, as well as a peek into the future of IWR/C.

Andy Hartz: R/C has almost always been a part of my life. In 1985, I was in the 5th grade and saw a Tamiya Grasshopper in the Sears Christmas Catalog. I knew I wanted one, but it would end up taking me over a year to get $50 saved up to put down as a down payment on a "loan" I took out from my parents to cover the cost.

I ran the Grasshopper for a while, then moved up to a Kyosho Optima Mid 4wd buggy. I tricked that car out and kicked the snot out of the neighborhood competition (okay, so it was only one other kid with an Optima Mid SE).

When I hit High School and College, some of my other interests took over for a long while and R/C took a back seat. I did attempt to build an R/C plane, and a Dumas Short Stuff deep vee, but neither got completed as I was spending a lot of money on the normal teenage stuff (i.e. girls, CDs, and pizza).

I got into boats about 2 years ago when I realized how amazingly fast electrics had become. I bought an MRP Bud Light Tunnel Hull because I've always loved the look of outboard engines. It's a good little boat, and it was a great way for me to get back into the R/C area.

I really love R/C boats because they're so simple and so complex at the same time. I mean, in it's purest form, an R/C boat is a floaty thingy with a motor, drive shaft, prop, and rudder. I bet you could make a fully functional R/C boat out of a 2-liter bottle if you wanted to. Contrasting this is a very high level of sophistication - the so called "black art." It takes a lot of talent to get a boat set up to be it's absolute best. Engine settings, prop, trim, pipe length ... basically everything about the boat has to work in harmony to get around the pond as fast as possible.

IW: Why did you decide to start the IWR/C page?

AH: First you have to understand one of my other pastimes - playing the PC game Quake and Quake II. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of pages dedicated to Quake. My favorite is PlanetQuake, a "news page" that gets updated 4-5 times a day with news, gossip, product reviews, interviews, etc.

Right after I got my MRP tunnel, I started looking online for good boating pages, and didn't really find what I was looking for - the PlanetQuake of R/C boating. So, I sat down one night and started messing with the Netscape HTML editor, and little by little IWR/C came together. Come to find out, IWR/C fills a niche not covered by other pages. I've still yet to find another page like it.

IW: About how much time do you spend working on your page every day?

AH: Probably about 1-2 hours a day to update the page and answer email would be conservative. Just because you don't see a page update doesn't mean I'm not doing something behind the scenes, and probably half of my time spent working on IWR/C is answering email. The Poll Tally days are the exception - it normally takes me 2 hours just to count the votes and update the necessary pages, on top of a normal daily update.

IW: Why do spend so much of your time working on a web page that you don't get paid for?

AH: Good question - this one made me think. The short answer is that I do it because I enjoy it. Don't get me wrong, editing HTML by hand day after day does get a bit tedious ... but I really enjoy interacting with people from around the globe that contact me via email. I also like seeing a page that I created listed on someone else's page as if to say, "This place is worth your time to visit." And I like to get up in the morning and check my hit counter to see that my page had been loaded 100 or more times since the last time I checked. It's all a great sense of accomplishment. It has also given me a great outlet to talk about R/C boats during the past winter when the weather wasn't so great for being down at the lake.

But, I think above all, I like doing it because it serves a purpose. R/C boating is made up of two types of people: the old guys who have been at it for many, many years, and the average boater who's just bought his first plastic hull. To become an experienced boater, you need to bridge the gap between newbie and old pro ... otherwise you move onto something else. If I had to put my purpose for maintaining IWR/C in one sentence, it would be:

I do IWR/C because it takes a lot of R/C boating resources and puts them in once place, giving access to those who may have otherwise never fully caught the R/C boating bug.

IW: In what ways does IWR/C's current content and form differ from what you originally had in mind?

AH: I guess I've had two big surprises. The first is that I thought most companies would jump at the chance to have their addresses and contact information put online in IWR/C's Commercial page. A lot of the people I contact reply, but those that do tend to be the little guys, like Jackrabbit Racing, Byrd's Boats, Marine Specialties, and CTS. Bigger companies have routinely ignored us completely, which is frustrating. The result of this has been a determined commitment by mysel f to do as much as I can for smaller companies.

The second big surprise is that the Reviews pages didn't go over very well. The intent of the page was to get a lot of readers to send in their opinions on a large cross section of boating related goods. I saw a similar setup for Stunt Kites a long time ago that literally had hundreds of reviews. You could really get a good feel for the kite you were about to buy from what 5-10 other people had said about it. Maybe my format was too strict, or maybe people didn't understand that I wanted (and needed) them to interact. So, after a few months of inactivity, the Reviews section was removed and replaced with the Setup Library, which has gone over very well, and sort of does what I had intended all along - lots of reader interaction and opinion.

IW: What advice would you give someone who wants to start his/her own webpage? If someone already has a webpage, what can they do to make it better?

AH: I actually started writing a How To article on this a week or so ago on this very topic. If more people want to see it, they should email me and urge me to finish. :)

But anyway, there are a lot of pages out there that can help you get started, such as the NCSA's Beginner's Guide and Johnny's Web Resource. I refer to these pages a lot, and think you should too.

If you're serious about creating a good web page, you need to learn HTML. You can open your web page in a text editor like Notepad to get at the raw HTML code. All of the HTML editors out there like Netscape, Hot Dog, and Pagemaker are great to get started on, but they can generate some really horrendous HTML.

For example, IWR/C's Commercial page was originally done in Netscape's 4.04 Editor. The output from Netscape was a 41K HTML file. I've gone back in and removed all of the redundant formatting, and reduced the file to about 22K - almost HALF of the original size. This also means it'll load in about HALF of the time! (Incidentally, after removing all this formatting, my computer crashed and I lost the 22K file and haven't gone back to repeat my work just yet - the file online is currently the bloated 41 K one).

I think the main problem with R/C Boating pages is a lack of content. There are a lot of pages out there that say something like "This is my wEbPaGe. Isn't it c00l?! Here's some PiCtUrEs! Here's some LiNkS!" ... but they don't have any content. By content, I mean setup tips, speeds, rpms ... hard facts and figures. The #1 rule of web pages is: Give people a reason to come to your page, and then give them 10 reasons to come back. Without content, you really get rid of about 9 1/2 of those reasons for people to return.

IW: Do you have any advice for a newbie who's just started R/C boating? What buying tips would you give him/her?

AH: First of all, buy everything you'll need all at once or in a very short amount of time. Having all the parts to put everything together really makes the hobby a lot more enjoyable. I didn't mention it, but part of the reason I got burnt out on cars in high school was that I'd start a project, buy half the parts for it, then not have the money to buy the rest. As a result, I never got anything finished and ended up wasting a lot of money.

Secondly, it's my recommendation not to buy the absolute cheapest setup you can just to save some money. I know it's an expensive hobby, and I'm not saying you have to go out and buy that $500 brushless motor or the $1000 pro-mod gasoline engine. I'm just saying spend some extra money to get a decent radio that will last you through more than one hull, buy the appropriate tools, and get some good starting equipment (or a good charger and/or ESC if you run electrics). You'll spend maybe 30%-50% more overall, but this type of equipment will be with you for several years as you move up from one hull to another - and it'll definitely impact how much you enjoy your first boat.

IW: What would be your ultimate "exotic" R/C boat project?

AH: I think my ultimate project would be to put one or more Thundertiger P-15 Turbojet engines onto a large scale gasser hull. The P-15's rotor spins at 120,000 rpm. The sound of the thing would be simply incredible. It doesn't have an output shaft, so the boat would be propelled by the raw thrust of the engine, like an airboat. I've actually talked to Thundertiger about the availability of the engines, and when they get to the U.S. sometime down the road, they'll be about $4,000 a piece.

IW: Here's the standard final question: Peer into your crystal ball and predict where this hobby/sport is going. What is going to be the next big thing? Where do you see IWR/C five years from now?

AH: I would expect to see more Gas boats hitting the market. The past few years has really been good for Gas boating, and I would expect that trend to continue. I also hope that the trend set by Warehouse hobbies and their E-Force line of $30 electric hulls will help lower the costs of getting into a quality fast electric.

The goal I'm working towards is a page supported by commercial advertisers. I removed the Reviews page so that we could go to a commercial page without having a potential conflict of interest between advertisers and what's said in the reviews. With the money from advertising, we can hire on a writer or two to do how-to articles. We can buy equipment specifically for IWR/C, such as a picture scanner, graphics programs, and other useful tools. And, we can use the money to advertise IWR/C in other publications - RCBM, RCM, other web pages, etc. My goal is to have this process underway by June of 1999, one year from our move to wwh.net.

Advertisement is a controversial subject, and last time I suggested it I got a few negative responses. I do think, however, that it can be done so that the advertisements don't clutter up the page or slow the pages down tremendously. I also feel that in order for this page to grow, we will need more help at the writing desk.

My dream for IWR/C five years from now is to have our own server somewhere online (www.iwrc.com, for example), and have the ability to give out space to well deserving web pages. You would come to IWR/C for news and info, but could also visit the cluster of pages we were hosting. They'd support us, and we'd support them, and together we could do some really cool things. RCOnline already does this with R/C Plane related pages, and PlanetQuake has basically perfected the concept.