ORIGINAL: WhiteKnuckles
Get a life and get a sense of humor. I'm done with this.

ORIGINAL: Mike in DC

I don't know exactly where you went wrong, but I can tell you that I had one of the best pilots in my club fly my first DPS, and you would not believe what that plane did. Everybody at the field was watching in amazement, and thoroughly enjoyed the flight. My favorite moment was an inverted low pass about 6" above the runway. Then, he tapped one wing tip on the runway, and when it bounced back, rolled a couple of times the other way and took off straight up. I'm still not sure that I saw it correctly, since it seems impossible as I write this. I don't think you can fly that fast inverted that close to the pavement on a plane that is "uncontrollable". The nice thing about seeing it was that from that point on, I knew that whatever the plane couldn't do, the fault was completely the pilot's (i.e. me).

Note that this was my first DPS, and I built it exactly according to plans (I like to start with a design someone else has proven). Since then I've learned enough to take at least a pound off the plane, and going from 6 pounds to 5 pounds makes a huge difference. I've built or re-built a total of 7 now, and two of my buddies love flying them as well as myself.

Chris may be correct that you're just not cut out for plastic. For one thing, it really helps to see that plastic is the SOLUTION to many problems. If you have the patience to build with balsa, and aren't dismayed to see your creation turn to toothpicks in a hard landing, then you might just not appreciate the problem that Spad was meant to solve. Another nice thing about Spad is they are simple, and all the servos, tank, control rods, etc., are all on the outside where it's easy to get to them. If you don't find this a virtue, then Spad may not appeal to you.

You don't give us a lot to work with, but to address your problems directly:

1. It's not really fair to substitute 4mm for 2mm, which is a huge design change, and then call the result a POS, now is it?

2. If your spar didn't break in two after you pulled out abuptly out of a dive, I'm not sure why it matters that it's soft wood.

3. As far as rigidity, if you built the plane with American downspout, which is what the plans call for, it should be plenty rigid. Real planes aren't all that rigid, by the way, which you can see by looking out the window when you're flying a real plane.

4. If you built the plane with a 30" fuse, it will waggle a bit in a cross-wind. Could this be what you mean by "uncontrollable"? A lot of guys stretch the fuse to 33", but it does add a couple of ounces of weight.

5. There's no doubt that gluing coroplast is the achilles heel of the spad world. I bought a primer meant specifically for coro and CA, so I never had any issues. Spad is always evolving, and I think you'll see that the newer designs rely a lot less on adhesives.

Sorry it didn't work out. There's nothing wrong with balsa. I have an OMP profile, and I love it. I kind of look at the profiles as the Spads of the balsa world, since their minimalism makes them about as easy to build and operate as you can get with wood.

ORIGINAL: koopster
What is this magical primer you speak of?

By the way, this thread has made me feel much better about my DPS addiction. I was starting to get the impression that the entire Spad community had moved on to the 3D planes, and I was starting to feel a little old-fashioned with my two DPS's. I just got back from the field today--had a ball doing inverted low passes. Whee!