I will be a fish and bite. 3 cent opinion. Your mileage may vary. Your moniker is K.I.S.S. Ok, why are you throwing money away at custom retracts? I see you inquired about building them. 99.9 percent of the guys out there would not know the difference between scale and Robarts. Now,if you are scaling to the N'th degree, go ahead. Otherwise, saved you a bunch of time and money. G-38's work just fine. my-3 was 42 to 44 lbs and it was maybe a little over half throttle at cruise. Also ran them both ways,mag and electronic. Your going to need weight up front. spring starters add weight and are something useful. Flew on 16oz tanks . Might want to think about service if the need arises. Quaddra parts? What the heck is a Quadrra? KISS> Servo's are of personal choosing. I had Hi-tec 605's on ailerons,elevators and rudder. Used a bell crank setup to run rudder and tail wheel steering. Yes, you don't need a seperate servo for steering. The tail is so light when balanced a mild cross wind will turn the airplane 90 degrees. Your airplane balances on the wing,NOT on the tail. 4 guys can move a full scale DC-3 on a FLAT surface. I was one of them doing this on N711Y. Use your Google-fu and find out who died in this airplane. No, I wasn't involved in this mishap. HS-81 on throttles. Flaps had HS- 425's. Yes, low power servos on flaps is no-no land for a lot of people but they stayed down because you don't lower flaps at high speed. See 1 to 1 scale airplanes and check out the checklist that has limitations flaps vs. airspeed. It's not going to fly 3D. One of the other DC-3 threads has lots of overboard building techniques that boggles my mind. In this post, I won't go into some of the truly ridiculous half truths that were said. PM if you want specifics. REMEMBER,this is my opinion. If you stick to the plans and don't throw a lumberyard of extra material in the tail, 40 to 45 lbs is normal. And no it doesn't fly like 45 lbs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrBu9JixQCo is my airplane flying. Good luck.