The first production plane that I assembled, with a DA-100, assembled per the manual with no modifications, dual 1650 nimh 5 cel packs, weighed exactly 28 pounds. I added canisters and picked up another pound, now it's 29. This is the red/yellow one shown in the manual photos, and I'm still flying it if anyone wants to come to Dallas and check my veracity.

If you start with mine at 28, change to a BME or ZDZ 100 engine, you've got 27 pounds or maybe a little less. Dick Hanson's with a ZDZ-80 weighs 26.5. He did some lightening of the h-stab, but that was mostly to get it to balance rather than reduce overall weight.

The problem is nobody builds a plane without making some changes, and people feel they need to add strengthening or other stuff, so as a practical matter most of them end up at 29-30, but our specs for the vanilla plane are accurate.

Just FYI, nobody has complained that it flies heavy, on the contrary everyone who owns one exclaims how nice a light it feels and how slow flight is so easy.

Tom Fawcett
Wild Hare R/c