STG,

Keep in mind these are 3D practice crashes. Never more than 30 feet in altitude. These are not 100 mph dives from high altitude like you might get in total radio failure. Our field is all mowed grass. It does get pretty hard in the summer time when the clay soil gets baked, but usually it's a mud fest when the spinning prop hits the dirt.

Another thing maybe I should have qualified is that the tufflight 4D has a break away motor mount, so some of the energy in the really hard nose down crashes is dissipated in breaking 2 nylon bolts, which allows the front end and landing gear to dis-assemble -- rather than hurting the plane (or the motor).

By far however, most of my crashes with the Saito have been silly prop breakers -- seldom more than from 10 foot altitude botched recoveries, but ALWAYS at full throttle in some sort of last ditch effort to NOT CRASH. The Saito has always come up smiling in these cases. I can remember having to re-position the muffler a few times when it would rotate on the threaded tube. Sometimes I would lose the "puke tube" fuel tubing that hangs down in the front. Still can't say enough good things about it.

Your OS 1.08 is in a slightly higher weight class than my .72, but still, I bet if you were to crash in a "botched 3D manner" you'd never break that motor either, or a Saito 150 for that matter. Still, if you were to break the motor from say, maybe hitting a hard hickory tree from a "non typical 3D crash" I'd suspect the carb to break off. This may be just as likely as the push rods getting bent on the Saito. At that point, a lot of things boil down to luck. It's a lot different from hovering over the ground (which is always there, asking your plane to cartwheel into it) vs hitting a random tree in a non-3D manner, which is how I assumed most guys would be crashing their birds in this forum.