Dang, you were RIGHT! [sm=biggrin.gif][sm=thumbup.gif]

I love this plane. Flies great, looks great, built great!! I'm really sold on this method of ARFing. If all of FTC/Modelfly's ARFs go together and fly like this, I'd buy another one in a second.

My Cardinal flies great with an O.S. FS-70 and APC 13x6 prop on Morgan Cool Power 5% and 10% fuel. In fact, the .70 is overkill. I can take off from a hard surface runway at half-throttle and fly with authority. I need nearly full throttle to take off from a grass field, but once airborne, it's just way more power than I need.

The plane balanced by putting the battery pack up against the firewall, underneath the tank. I had to input about a dozen clicks of uptrim and a few clicks of aileron on the first flight. Since then, I've also added about an ounce of lead inside the cowl underneath the engine. Handles just a little bit better that way.

I managed to tip stall once on a touch and go. I just let it get too slow before powering up. It cartwheeled once and broke the prop and the tiller arm off of the nose gear strut, but suffered no other damage -- not even a grass stain. I expoxied the tiller arm back on, using some wire wrapped around the strut shaft as reinforcement inside the expoxy. It's worked fine since. And I've not tip-stalled it again, either.

I made a modification to the rudder system while building it: instead of using the pull-pull rudder cables, I just installed a second carbon-fiber arrow shaft for a rudder pushrod with short lengths of pushrod wire epoxied inside both ends. The rear wire goes out the same hole on the left rear of the fuselage to the rudder control horn. That's the way most of my planes work the rudder, and I thought it simplied things.

I also used three-inch 1/4x20 nylon bolts for the wing holddowns. Since the bolts screw in straight up and down in relation to the center bulkhead, the angle that the bolt heads mated to the wing surface wasn't right: The wing surface slopes downwards towards the back. The bolt heads would have clamped down on the surface unevenly, which I didn't like. I looked around the hobby shop for a solution and bought a set of Sullivan (I think) square engine mounting angled thrust shims. I cut out smaller one-inch sqares from the shims to equal the mismatch angle between the bolt heads and wing slope. Drilled 1/4-inch holes and now the bolt heads clamp down on top of the shims, which contact the wing evenly all the way around.

Anyway, I'm really, REALLY happy with this plane!

Regards,
-- Rod