Well, I left the incidences the way they were and flew the thing. Either the longer nose or the gyro or both fixed the ground loop problem. Once in the air the plane seems to fly like it weighes a ton. Anythng less than 3/4 throttle in a turn and she heads straight for the ground. It's also quite twitchy about it's ailerons even at the low throw settings. Somewhere just under 3/4 throttle it gets hard to control even in straight-line flight. Landings need to be performed like a jet coming in hot. I crashed it twice already. It is now pretty obvious why this biplane was for sale in the first place. All the negative comments on the web about this biplane seem to be fairly accurate. The best luck people have had is with larger engines that overcome some of the tail heaviness and then give it enough power to actually fly decently. I'm just not willing to risk a new Saito 82 4-stroke in it. I'll fix it one more time and put a dummy engine in it. It will look nice hanging from the ceiling.

Meanwhile, the best thing about that bird was the Magnum .52 4-stoke engine. It sounds like it's twice as big an engine and runs and transitions very smoothly. I'll put that in a World Models 40-size Ultimate Biplane and my bet is it will fly a whole lot better.

Thanks for all the help from forum members. Unfortunately, sometimes a turd is just a turd and there just ain't a clean end to pick it up by.