Ryan, thanks for the feedback, most useful.

I hear you about having to flip the airplane over to install batteries. I was going to make a stand to ease this. The biggest reason I went to the belly was it seemed that I would be able to get the most airflow across the batteries and controller. Obviously I did not consider the vertical CG. It may be difficult to to tell from the pictures but the batteries are actually 4.25" below the wing tube ( Center of battery to center of tube ) it you feel this is too far off the cernter line then I will take your advice and move them to under the canopy and work on getting better airflow to them. I am also going to construct a couple more plates with the nylon hardware and see just what kind of shear force it takes to make it fail. starting over again I would extend the firewall. I originally intended to use an OS 160 . After seeing and talking with a few of the pattern gurus in my district I made the jump to electric.



Nonstop, The fuse is actually quite light. Without the motor mount landing gear it is 1.9 lbs. The fuse is not really sheeted, the 3/32 balsa sides are structural, The fuse is built with these sides as a box if you will with cross bracing to eliminate flex then the formers and stringers are added top and bottom. The turtledeck us 3/16 square spruce stringers with the formers being 1/8 med balsa. I did consider a balsa sheeted foam unit because it would look much nicer but in the end the stringers were chosen because it it lighter.