I entered into this project with a little bit of trepidation. I'm NOT very good with my hands, especially in tight places. In fact, I'm at least in the running for the King of the Klutzes award for 2003. 15 years ago, I made a brief foray into R/C by building an RC-10 electric car and it was a complete disaster due to my clumsy hands. Thus, when my brother got me keyed up to look at model airplanes again I was pleasantly surprised to see that now, 15 years later in the hobby, there is a nice proliferation of well-made ARFs which suits my building skills just great.

15 years ... man I feel old....

In any case...

SIG KADET LT-40 ARF:
First, the plane itself. All told, I figure I spent about 30 hours building the plane. I could probably easily knock 10 hours off of that if I had to do it again, especially if I was to forgo the external recharging jack (more on that below).

All in all, the Kadet is well put together. I noticed only one minor issue that I could see with the construction. The pre-installed aileron control rods have a pre-cut channel to move in, and those channels are not the same length. Thus, the left and right aileron don't have the same amount of possible travel. I don't think it will matter since the servo won't require the full throw, but it's an inconsistancy that jumped out at me. I suspect this minor flaw is unique to my unit.

I mentioned above the fact that the manual doesn't match up with the plane that's delivered. This wasn't a show stopper, but a person could easily get confused, especially regarding the attaching of the wing to the body which is completely absent from the book in ANY form. Poor job, Sig! I can only hope that the updated manual mentioned elsewhere in this thread reaches the sales channels before long.

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O.S. .46LA ENGINE:
While the engine itself hasn't flown yet (or even been started for that matter) I did want to make one quick comment regarding it. The engine is a very cool (IMHO) cobalt-blue color. However, the muffler and carb is a traditional gunmetal-grey color. Why bother going through the hassle of designing and selling a blue engine only to make it clash so distinctly with a giant grey muffler? Seems rather silly.

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HiTEC ECLIPSE 7 RADIO
This is one complicated radio and it will be a long while before I understand all the nuances of it. However, there was one thing I wanted to comment on here. The radio came with 4 422 digital servos. However, when removing the stock round control arms to put in the straight ones, the head on one of the screws stripped out and I eventually had to dremel the round nylon contol arm off to get a grip on the screw with a pair of pliers. Not really a complaint towards HiTec per se, really could happen to any servo. Hard part seems to be in finding a replacement screw - guy at the hobby shop said the only way to get one was to buy a new servo.

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GREAT PLANES SWITCH & CHARGE JACK
I saw this in the Tower catalog for $3 and I figured "what the heck". It essentially provides an external plug for charging your receiver as well as a push/pull on-off switch all in one nice little housing.

I really wanted to install this on the top of the aircraft behind the wing so it would be easy to get to on the flight line. Unfortunately, it wouldn't work out that way due to the fact that the wires on the receiver's on-off switch (which mates into this assembly) were too short and I didn't want to try splicing and extension into it. So, instead I decided to mount it to the port side.

Ugh. What a PAIN IN THE *ahem*.

It probably took me 4 hours to get it installed. The problem was that the space I had to work in was very cramped and my butterfingers didn't help any. In addition, when I cut the hole out for the assembly to poke through, I was 1/2 an inch too low.

That said, I think in the end it looks pretty good, but I recommend against it unless you know where you want it and how you are going to get it there.

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All in all, a good build. I'm looking forward to showing it off at the monthly RC club meeting (ho hum, another trainer; boring but I'm proud of it) and hopefully getting it into the air later this month.