A year and a half after I started flying, I decided I wanted to build. I found myself hooked up with a 70's era pattern ship called a Dash 5. Now it did have instructions BUT, they were all in Japanese and I'm a little rusty with that. Anyway, I had never built anything before and another year and a half later.........it was finished! Loved every minute of beating my head against the wall and for my second build, I now have a 92" Extra short kit. Gonna order up some balsa soon and put it on the table this winter.

How does that fit this question, here's my opinion.........find a set of instructions and go for it. If you're in a rush, put it up but if you have time to spend and want to learn about the construction of what we fly and how it all works, build it and they will come. The neat part about building is that if you find you make a mistake, it can be fixed. Not having any building skills when I started my kit, and not having a clue how to read Japanese, it was kind of like the same situation you're in and I found the challanges of figureing out some of my own engineering and redesigning to fit my particular needs to be the most satisfying.

Once you do build it, get it all set up and take it to the field, you'll be nothing but smiles after you see you're creation in the air for the first time. I had a friend of mine offer to maiden mine but I declined as I figured that if this thing was going to crash for some reason I caused building it, then it was gonna be me that took it in!

Find yourself a set of instructions and go for it. Since it was given to you, and since you've found yourself interested enough in building to start it, what do you really have to loose?

Spend time while you're building to prepare youself to fly it. Use a sim and spend time behind the sticks of a tx bound up to a plane that you're abilities are up to. When it's done and ready, move up to flying the Champ.

Just my .01 cent.