Hi Bob,

I`m interested in your thread here and checked out your wreckage too.

I have a couple of newbies under my wing and now that they can perform mild solo aerobatics with their ARF trainers I thought I would get them into something a little hotter and at the same time get them involved in a simple build. Accordingly, I got a couple of the 35" Shrike kits in from USA - they arrived about ten days ago. I was a little concerned that they may be a little too hot for openers and so we are building them around OS .15`s for a start.

Such has been the interest, we have four models on the build from those two kits! Attached is a pic taken of the one on my bench. Most of my building these days is O/D stuff; I haven`t built a model from a kit for several years. There are a couple of things about this one that concern me. The wing structure seems to be very flimsy. I reckon that to locate the spars on the neutral axis is about as inefficient as you can get, and then making them from balsa mightn`t help. I`m at the stage where I am about to apply the LE sheeting and am considering adding in a 3/16" sq hardwood (white pine) spar at top and bottom of the wing at the rear of the sheeting, adding in a few 1/16" shear webs and forming an old fashioned 'D' box.

If I was doing this from scratch I would consider making the complete wing in one piece on a two-wire jig and then sliding the fueslage sides onto that from each side. That may add a little to the weight, but should make it considerably stronger maybe?

I have also altered the LE by providing a 3/32" vertical stage 1 LE to glue the sheeting to, and will follow up with a 3/16" secondary LE to the front of that after the sheeting is in place. Also marked out the wing plan on two pieces of MDF board and building on that as a jig each side of the fuselage.

My $0.02 worth.

Alan W