checksix,
My overall impression of the plane and others that have seen it is, Top shelf quality. Especially for the money. With a little care it should come out under 10lbs ready to fly. I am shooting for a weight between 9.5 to 9.75 RTF. Of course I havent flown it yet but reports are very good from those that have flown it.

These are the few things that I have found with the kit.

Wing
The wing tube is not perfectly round like say a PBG tube. With this in mind it looks like the phenolic sockets in the wings and the one that goes in fuse were made by wrapping glass around the wing tube. The reason I say this is that the wing tube fits better in one direction then the other. I also had to do a bit of sanding in the phenolic tubes to get the wing tube to slide in. I also found that the phenolic tube that goes into the fuse was slightly loose on the wing tube. You can use tape on the tube or put a bit of epoxy/micro balloons in the phenolic tube and sand for perfect fit.

Stab halves
They use a carbon tube for the tail. It was a tight fit into the tail halves and needed to be sanded to fit. They use a piece of carbon rod to set the incidence and act as anti-rotation pins. The problem I see is that the directions tell you to set the wing at 0 and the tail at negative .2 to .3 degrees. If you do it this way, once you have the plane finished with the tail post glued in it would take some serious work to change the incidence on the tail. So you have 2 choices. Fist is set the tail at 0 degrees and set the wing to positive .2 to .3 degrees. (Same as setting the tail at negative .2 to .3 degrees). It will be much easier to change the incidence on the wing after the plane is built if you find out you need to. The second choice would be to adapt a set of tail adjuster to the plane to allow incidence changes to the stab. I opted for option 1. I didn’t follow instructions on the mounting of the elevator servos. I decided to mount the servos inside the stab half instead of the stock way were you need to cut a big hole for the servo case to fit into the fuse. I took this idea from a German website that has build pictures. You will find it really useful. http://www.weinig-web.de/impact.htm


I made the rudder removable which was pretty easy since they use Robart hinges. This will allow me to ship the plane. I can get some picture and do an in depth here if people want me to.

Landing gear
I verified that the mold marks in the fuse for the gear exits were equally spaced. Cut these out before sanding and fitting the gear formers. My formers needed a bit of sanding to line up properly.

Firewall
The firewall is not a perfect fit. I had pretty good sized gaps between the fuse and firewall at the bottom and where the fuse bulges on the sides. I am putting in a Hyde ARIAS mount so I needed a bit beefier firewall then what was included so I cut a new one out of ¼ end grain balsa carbon. If you are going to use a soft mount with a separate nose ring the included firewall will be strong enough. Basically you will fit the stock fire wall and use some ply to fill in the gaps.

Control Horns
The stock control horns will work if you are comfortable with using standard metal clevises. I figured it will eventually get sloppy and they do not recommend using ball links on the stock horns because of twisting. So I ordered some .074 Uni carbon from Aerospace Composites. I cut out new horns and they should be more then stiff enough to handle ball links.

Only other thing I’m doing different is that I’m using carbon pins and a 4-40 bolts to hold the canopy and chin cowl instead of their method. If you have any more questions I will be happy to try and answer them. Go to the German website because for me a picture is worth a thousand words. If you want some pictures of mine I would be happy to do that as well.