Originally Posted by Glowgeek

Yep, sounds like the cg is too far forward.

My first low wing "trainer" was an unknown plane, very 4Star-ish. It was set up nose heavy and I had the same problems you described. Seemed I could never reach stall speed without pulling in a ton of elev. I tried all sorts of landing techiques, the long shallow approach, the steep swooping approach, chopping the throttle in the base turn. Everything I tried either caused bouncing down the runway, floating down the runway forever or plopping down hard. The elev always felt mushy on final approach and the timing to stall had to be spot on to land decent.

I did a lot of research on landing problems and techniques and eventually solved the problem by reading and following Peter Goldsmith's Trimming Chart, as well as others. Problem solved. Moving the cg back eliminated the need to pull in much elev until the landing flare, a foot or so off the ground, and then only to control rate of descent for those last couple of seconds before full stall. With a more rearward cg the plane descends by reducing power instead of wanting to dive with a nose down attitude therefore not much elev is needed during a slow glide. It was a game changer for me to have the plane descend without diving and to have plenty of elev authority at touch down.

Anyway, just my thoughts.