Hi Russ,

Thanks for the compliments ... I kind of eyeballed the gear dimensions, but it came out in the right ball park so I'm pretty happy with it. I wanted to avoid having them look too short or two tall ...

Yes, I installed the main gear just ahead of the forward cabin former (i.e. just ahead of the leading edge of the wing.) Ground handling is great. It's robust, it tracks well, and I can do near perfect 3 point landings (relative to my lack of piloting skill anyway.) :-) If you are careful you can touch this thing down with amazing gentleness. I've seen no tendency to nose over when taxiing or landing in grass.

I special ordered some aluminum gear from TNT Landing gear. They have an order form where you specify the various dimensions and a week later or so, your gear shows up ... it's about $25 a pop, so not extremely cheap, but it's all prebent exactly the way you want and has a nice professional look. If I had it to do all over again, I'd probably go a little thicker or a little wider on the main gear because it does have more flex in it than I was expecting. That hasn't been a problem though because on landing it touches down gentler than I ever would have imagined or expected.

I did go with the stock wheels ... I figured there might be a chance I would need to fly off a less than ideal surface so I stayed big with the main wheels. They seem like a pretty nice match for this size plane.

I'm running an ASP (same as Magnum) 61 four stroke swing a 12x6 prop for starters. That seems to be a pretty good combination. There's no point in trying to overspeed a Kadet ... things start to vibrate and that just slows you right back down. :-)

Some day if I get really bored, I might go buy some aluminum stock in an airfoil shape and make some fake wing braces. That and some wheel pants would be a slick addition.

I'm a moderately experienced sport pilot, so I wasn't expecting a lot out of the Kadet in terms of fun, but it's really great! It is big and slow and you can work the rudder and see the effects of slipping. You can do cross wind take offs and landing "by the book" and see the effects and have time to play with the cross controlled surfaces. It's *really* cool ... and does really nice rolls for a trainer ... better than my super sportstser 40 ever did. I'm thoroughly impressed with this airplane.

That said, it is slow and it basically can't go fast. If you over power it, you'll probalby start losing important pieces. So you just have to accept it for what it is and isn't and enjoy the classic stick and rudder piloting, and incredibly smooth and gentle landings.

Good luck with yours! I'm going to go fly mine this afternoon if the rain holds off ...

Curt.