RE: Need shrike advice
I have been flying my 32SX powered Shrike 10 for 2 months now. While I have never had a problem hand-launching it, I have had my share of both smooth landings and hard,fast, not-so-smooth landings! Hey, bleeding off speed from 145 mph to zero can be tricky when you're dead-sticking it into a small patch of grass!! One item that became immediately obvious was that the bottom TE corners of the fins are a definite weak spot. They're hanging down and are often the first thing to touch ground on landing, so they will break and crack on ya eventually. All Shrike owners will know what I'm talking about.
The little copper wire they want you to add as fin skids is just worthless. Drilling the hole to attach it just creates a weak spot in the balsa, even when filled with epoxy. I ended up adding 1 inch strips of carbon fiber to both sides of each fin corner, plus along the whole vertical trailing edge to give it some needed strength.
If I were to do it again, I think I would just wrap the fin bottom corners in glass cloth and be done with it.
Darwin