I beg to differ. Silk and dope is about half the weight of plastic film, name your poison, and in the same ballpark weightwise as litespan. It'll also add strength to the wing, something NO plastic film can honestly say. Take a look at free flight rubber models. Tissue and nitrate dope on 1/32 or 1/16 balsa sticks. Seems to have worked fairly well, and you won't ever see one of those covered in monokote. It won't shrink anything out of shape unless he uses nitrate dope to excess. I'd use nitrate only to attach the silk,one coat of nitrate to shrink it, and 3 or 4 coats of butyrate.