Well, if you're spending $125+ for a digital servo with enough torque to handle huge control surfaces, and you need at least two on the elevator, two on the rudder, and two for ailerons.... ($750 plus heavy guage extensions) Then you have to buy a couple of "match boxes" at $100 apiece so that those dual servos can be precisely adjusted... So there's a $1,000

Of course, with a plane like that you'll want dual receivers, and they'll have to be PCM, so that's another $300, and dual 3000 mAH battery packs with heavy duty switches for redundancy. (Or spend $300 or more for the equivalent in LiPolys) $360 to $650.

And of course you'll use carbon fiber for push rods, or very large, expensive pull/pull set-ups. And the control horns you use will be at least $8 each. Figure close to $100 here.

Let's not forget that carbon fiber prop that cost you $140, and the $200 aluminum spinner, both to make full use of the power from that $2,500 engine.

Add that up and it's close to $5,000 tucked into that $1,700 ARF.

Anyway, there's a guy in our club that's built a couple of 40% aerobatic (3D) birds in the past year, and he had over $8,000 in each of them. [X(]
Dennis-