Trev, first things first. SHE FLEW!!! So strange to see the model up in the air as opposed to on my workbench! I had the club president who also happens to be our resident ace fly it. He has competed in several national scale championships often being recruited to be the pilot for someone else's plane. After checking it out -- and everything checked out perfectly -- he took it up for two 10 minutes flights. The throws were fine and the CG was perfect without any additional weight in the nose. CG was about 3" back from the leading edge. This was without the dummy engine so with the dummy it'll be just a bit further forward. I quickly shot off 3 rolls of 36 print film but focus was a problem and I'll be lucky if I get 2 or 3 sharp pix. If any turn out I'll post them. If not well there's always next week.

Now on to the flight report. Carl says the plane is a challenge to handle. At 8 lbs it seems to be underpowered with the 52FS turning a 13/5 prop. Maybe I can squeeze a bit more power out of it. But I might also eventually consider whether I could be using a Magnum 70FS. Carl says you have to be willing to allow it to climb out very slowly and to use the rudder A LOT! He just tried lazy patterns around the fileld and nothing fancy. With all the drag you also have to keep the throttle up and fly it onto the runway. When he cut power it came down fast. He said he doubted that it would fly with a scale airfoil. All in all, he recommended that I get a bit more flying experience before I try to fly it myself and that's perfectly OK since in two weeks I'm off to Japan and the EIII isn't coming with me. It'll give me something to shoot for.

All in all building the EIII has been an immensily enjoyable and educational experience. I feel that I've finally after years and years of looking at scale planes finally got my feet wet just a bit.

One your question about styrene, according to one English-German dictionary site "styrene" is "das Styrol" though it's probably used in one of those incredibly long German compounds like "Heerengruentischkugelstossspielanlage" (which apparently was once used as a substitute for "billiard" during a period of German nationalism when they sought to replace French terms with "native" German ones (others "sauce" - "ueberguss", "trottroire" (sp.?) with "buegersteig"). Anyway, you ought to be able to buy styrene sheets in any well-stocked plastic model shop or maybe online.

Oh, and here are a couple of non-flying shots at the field -- Southern Cal is pretty dry this time of year (and all year long if we weren't constantly sucking the *** of the Colorado River. No grass field take-offs here. Maybe I should have done the EIII up in Turkish colors and imagined it was flying in Ottoman Palestine!