So the unpacking is complete... I gave up on trying to clear enough space to photograph in the shop, so I moved the big parts to the front lawn get get them in a good enough position.
Despite the dings in the box and the loose items, the only damage I found to anything was the cowl ring being cracked (no biggy, as you'll see).
The fuselage appears to be entirely ply, balsa and sheeting, covered with Oracover. they did a really nice job of the covering. No dings or wrinkles are apparent. The cockpit is a removable hatch, that is held on by a spring loaded latch on the top. As has been said, this thing is huge...
The interior is indeed cavernous.
My big hands will fit way back in there with no problems at all.
The surfboards, er, wings are also nicely covered, with no dings or wrinkles. Pull strings are threaded through to the servo hatches.
The wingtip nav lights are crying out for a lighting system. They are faked here by little painted bumps, but both sides are red.
The canopy glass is pretty fuzzy. This isn't all bad as the instrumentation is not even the right colors, let alone accurate, and the pilot figure is a joke. This is the biggest disappointment for me.
The motor mount is substantial, and has a fair amount of right thrust built in it. It doesn't appear to have down thrust built in.
The tail has another hatch with spring loaded retaining latch, to allow easy access to the tail gear mounting and steering hardware. The horizontal stab mounts appear majorly over-engineered to me.
A horizontal stab half, again nicely covered and without wrinkles. All control surfaces are hinged, but not glued.
The wheel pants are very substantial fiberglass parts. I wouldn't even bother to reinforce these. The landing lights again contain red painted bumps for bulbs.
The cowl is monstrous, I believe you might even be able to get a G62 in there without cutting. It is very thick and nicely painted, with a few very minor defects.I want to add the very obvious exhaust to the outside of it that the prototype has, and this will be a challenge to make as nicely as the rest of the cowl.
There is an included two-piece dummy radial, a plywood cowl ring (that cracked in half in transit; because of the way it is mounted to the fuse this really makes no difference).
Here are the very substantial main landing gear legs, which appear to be thickly painted very stiff aluminum. Also in this picture is the mounting hardware, the tail gear (which is sprung), a nice tail wheel, a very sturdy plastic spinner, very nice control horns and mounting hardware, what looks to be about a 20oz fuel tank, and the control rods (which run in pre-mounted tubes in the fuse). Looking at this so far, I won't be replacing any of it.
Also included is an electric motor mount set, including aluminum standoffs, for those of you crazy enough to fly something this size on batteries... Also here are the sturdy aluminum wing tubes and stab tube.
Finally, we have the main wheels. They are about 5", and rather than the cheezy foam we've been seeing on models like this, appear to be foam-filled plastic. They are very hard. If you're finicky, you might want to spend $75 on nice rubber ones, but I won't bother to start with.
So on with the assembly!
