Thanks.....

This rebuild is going to be an interesting experiment. First off, the plane is a .40 sized "stick" that has a narrow fuse width and a very slender tail boom and was intended to be used with a .40 2-stroke. From the beginning, my intension was to build an almost rediculously overpowered sportster that would easily power itself through high winds (which we tend to have a lot of at our flying feild). I built the plane according to the plans (all balsa except for one former, the firewall and the landing gear plate) so the plane was pretty light. I mounted a Saito .65 4-stroke to the firewall which made it pretty nose heavy (duh!!), so I had to move the rudder and elevator servos back into the tail boom, I had to used a Hayes slimline tank and mounted it under the wing centered over the CG, and the battery and receiver were mounted aft of the trailing edge of the wing just to get it to balance.

Now for the rebuild... the original narrow, slender, all balsa fuse turned out to be pretty delicate, especially since I had to cut part of the structure away to mount the servos in the tail boom. This time around, I built the forward 2/3 of the fuse out of 1/8" lite-ply, so to compensate for adding all that weight to the front of the plane, I shortened the nose up a little and moved the firewall aft about 7/8". Then, as stated above, I had to lengthen the tail boom about 1 5/8" to get the empennage to line up correctly with the new fuse. The net result is an overall increase of 3/4" in the length of the fuse. The empennage was attached last night, so it's "game on".... I'm curious to find out how she flies. I hope it's as good or better than the original flew.