Hey guys, you gave so much help with the assembly of this bird I wanted to provide feedback on the results of my initial flights. I installed the Saito 90cc radial in mine and finished the cockpit area with a pilot and some gauges along with finishing back of the cockpit with a floor and some fake storage boxes. For the 90cc radial to fit with the ring muffler I had to remove 2 3/4" of the engine mount. I reinforced the area with a doubled up 5ply 1/4" plywood and fiberglassed the entire area for additional strength. I could not add triangle stock on the inside of the mount as they would interfere with the mounting bolts.

Everything assembled just fine. I was impressed with the kit in terms of fit and finish with the hardware being adequate but nothing spectacular like you might find on a H9 kit. Given the weight of the radial along with your comments that the bird tended to be nose heavy even with the recommended DLE61 I built a small plywood box that sits just forward of the tail wheel area. This plywood box contains lead powder/epoxy mix that I used to get the CG correct. Put over a pound of lead in the tail to accomplish this. Servos for all the surfaces were placed in their respective location per the manual. I took a quick peek at moving the elevator servos closer to the rear but with such a thin stab and minimal access to the tail area via the hatch the migration of the servo's to the tail looked very time consuming to me.

The initial flights had me nervous due to the fact the bird was several pounds heavier than the recommended power solution. I didn't weight it because I was afraid I'd get depressed! The other thing that caught my eye was the lack of ground clearance between the landing surface and the wheel pants. I fly off of a pretty rough geo-text runway and I've had trouble in the past with the front of wheel pants catching the geo-tex while running down the runway. The material kind of puffs up slightly as you move forward. Most of us do not use wheel pants on this runway. But, the Lysander looks very odd without the wheel pants so I said a couple of prayers and decided to run with them on.

I fly in Colorado where its always windy. Pretty rare for us not to have a 15mph crosswind. The Lysander proved to be a handful on crosswind takeoffs. The biggest issue is too much play in the tailwheel. Tightening the tailwheel wires would work for a limited time but they appeared to be stretching after each use requiring additional tension. I'm going to have to replace the wire with something stronger or go to a solid pushrod to the tailwheel to get a better solution. I may also put springs in from the wire to the servo to keep a solid tension on the tailwheel. Not sure which direction I will take.

Power proved to be a non-issue. The 90cc radial threw it around just fine with mild aerobatics never a problem. I did mix rudder to ailerons.to clean up the turns. The Lysander requires a longer rollout for take off than I expected but nothing extravagant, probably 200 feet or so.

Landing was where I ran into issues. As predicted the wheel pants proved to be a huge problem. I'm not sure if you guys have the same issue but when landing and slowing the bird down the nose tends to sink causing to want to land at nose low attitude. A little more power didn't seem to want to bring that nose up unless you applied more power than you really wanted for landing. I tried several different approaches with lower and faster speeds along with full elevator to the point where you would swear it would stall. I was never able to get the bird to come in with more of a tail low attitude. The end result is I had 2 of 4 landings result in the front of the pants catching enough of the runway to flip the bird over. This took out two props and cracked my wheel pants.

My plan is to modify the wheel pants to remove the section where the landing lights are to get the pants taller. Although not scale its what I'll need to do to fly off my runway. I have another set of pants that I will use for warbird events where there is a hard surface runway.

Sorry for the long winded update but I wanted to let any future pilots know what I found with the use of the 90cc radial. I want to thank all of you that previously reported what you found as it helped me in my assembly.
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