I bought a short kit from the current supplier in 2009, and hope to begin my build sometime later this year. I have bought all the wood and created a "full kit" having fabricated all the parts. Power will likely be a VVRC 40 cc twin. May be a bit over powered, but that is what throttles are for!
I am doing a bit of re-engineering to the wing. The airplane as designed uses the Sig aluminum wing joiners. I am NOT a fan of these. They are heavy, fussy to install and align, and the bolts are easy to strip after attaching the wings multiple times. The ones in this plane are at an angle, losing some of their strength in effect. Wing load will make the wing want to angle forward a bit. Not good. Also, the load bearing spar and the Sig joiners are WAY forward on the wing, at about 15% of chord, or only 2 1/4" from the leading edge. When the wing loads, it will want to twist to a washout position. This is made worse by the lack of torsional stiffness of the wing due in part to there being no top rear spar. The rear has only a bottom balsa spar. As noted here somewhere, the struts are very functional as designed. They are needed for strength of the wing in bending, and would hopefully prevent washout from twisting under load.
To get around all these problems, I have ordered a carbon fiber wing rod with phenolic outer tube. It is 36" x 1" with .042" wall. I will mount it at the CG position. The ribs will be drilled for the rod on a drill press as a stack, with the dihedral set by offsetting the stack. The first two balsa ribs outside of the 1/4" ply ribs will be replaced with more ply ribs. The added ply ribs are spaced just right to use the entire 36" rod. I am also adding a top rear spar of 3/8" x 1/4" (identical material to the front spars) above the large balsa bottom spar.
The effect of all of this is (1) torsionally stiffer wing and (2) stiffer wing in bending, with forces at the center of lift through the rod. The greatly stiffer wing could fly with no struts at all. I will of course add them for scale fidelity, but don't have to worry about a strut failure causing loss of the aircraft. The plane will build faster this way, be easier to assemble at the field, and weight gain from all this will be very little if any. The CF rod is very light. I will add a couple of nylon bolts through the cabin root rib to the first wing rib to hold the wing in place on the rod.