Well, here's my Vmar story. My instructor liked Vmar and said the VAN RV-4 might be a good second plane for me. He liked his Vmar T-34 and thought the quality was good. I got on RCU and read a number of posts from fliers who thought Vmar quality was lousy, so I was skeptical about getting the plane. I called Richmond RC and spoke with a gentleman who assured me that their quality was good and implied that some of the posts on RCU may have been put there by competitors. So I ordered the VAN RV-4 ARF kit. It was back ordered for a couple of weeks, but it finally arrived.

I agree with those who describe a bad smell coming from the box. Pew! No problem, I just let it air out for a while. Everything in the kit appeared to be there, so I began by dry fitting the wing halves together. The first thing was that the wing brace was too long. I had to remove about 1/8 inch from each end to prevent it from bottoming out inside each wing. Once I was able to push the wing halves together, I noticed that the wing halves were misaligned by slightly less than 1/10 inch. The left leading edge was trailing the right leading edge by that much. I couldn't believe it! The two halves did, in fact, fit into the bottom of the fuselage, but just barely.

So I called Richmond RC. The man there said that they have a 3% tolerance on all of their dimensions. At first, that doesn't seem like much, but over 5 inches, that is .150 inch! Anyway, he told me if I was unhappy, to send it back. Well after spending $39 for shipping and insurance and waiting nearly two weeks for it to get back to Canada, the guy calls me back. (I should add here that there is a woman who works in customer service who was quite unfriendly whenever I would call to see if my plane had arrived). Anyway, he said there is absolutely nothing wrong with the plane and that he joined the two wing halves together and they fit perfectly. I couldn't believe it!

The guy said he dry fitted the whole plane together and everything fit perfectly! I know that's not true. He also said the precision of the plane's parts were as good as his $60,000 Mercedes! I asked him if he would sort through some wings and find two halves that fit together better. He said he would do whatever I wanted as long as I paid him $85 per hour!

Sorry for getting long winded. He said he would send me a refund check right away. I'm really bummed because I really liked the look of the semi-scale ARF and even had a radio with enough channels to operate ailerons separately and still operate the flaps.

I was very tactful during all of the conversations I had with VMAR. I was never sarcastic and angry with them. Nevertheless, their attitude was poor. So as far as I'm concerned- I won't be buying another VMAR.