Jake,
For what my opinion is worth, I prefer the 1/4-20 nylon screws, for afew reasons:
- They are still plenty strong to hold up even at gold speeds, yet they will sometimes still snap off when the airframe makes those unauthorized contacts with the ground, andoccasionally save the airframe from quite as extensive damage (when you are really lucky).
- Being a bigger diameter, there is more wood that would have to be "compressed" in order to enlarge the holes. This makes the area around the bolts slightly more resistant to eventually enlarging the holes through vibration, "hanger rash" dings, and tweaking the wings on bad landings and flipsat the end of the runway.
- When I've cartwheeled planes with the smaller diameter metal bolts, the sheer just pulls them right through the wood and out the back at the trailing edge, making a repair to this area much more difficult, and weakening the structure so much that even when repairable, I find it hard to trust that it will hold over the long-haul. Similar to what I said in an earlier post, that isjust onemore thing going on inthe back of your mind, potentially worrying/distracting you when you want tohave fullconcentration on the competition.
- When one falls out, and you can't find it, someone always has a 1/4-20 nylon bolt. Will they happen to have that <u>metric</u> size that comes standard with the kit?