For many years I had believed that there was no benefit to model glider from the addition of weight in the form of ballast. The after the purchase of my first moulded model, a Shooting Star, I had reason to change my mind. The Shooting Star has a ballast tube mounted centrally on the CG in the fuselage of the model. With a little intelligent use of cast lead slugs in this tube, the speed range and the wind range of the model were dramatically expanded. The model would come alive and carry much more energy throughout manoeuvres that without the added weight. Following models such as the Acacia F3F, Simprop Sagitta and Wizard Compact all had ballasting ability and I soon came to realise that the people who had long since taught me how to Slope Soar didn't really have a clue what they were talking about. As a consequence of my experiences I started to retro fit ballast tubes to many of my model. The results were transformed performances that breathed new life into old gliders. The following describes how to go about making a simple ballast tube to fit into your gliders and transform them and their performance to enhance your flying.