Hi rckid,

Wow that's a pretty good idea. You will probably make a good engineer some day. There's one problem I see however. Other than the engine, the battery pack is the heaviest single component in the plane. Therefore it needs to be securely mounted, you do not want it moving around during flight. The HW is capable of some wild manuvers that will shake a pack loose that is not very securely mounted. This can cause a crash due to shifting CG or the pack comming unpluged from the reciever.

What I did with my HW was basicly to use masking tape and tape the whole thing together before covering. Bolt the engine on (with prop) , tape the fuel tank on, install fuel lines, tape the landing gear on. Put your radio gear in the plane (servos, rx, switch) move the batery pack around untill you find your ballance point. Essentialy just mock up the plane with all your compnents as best you can then move things around untill it's right. I even mocked mine up with throttle and aleron pushrods but I don't think it's necessary.

Any way once you know where eveything is going to go, then you can remove it all, cover then reinstall. Covering really wont effect CG much. I actualy found it easier to install all my radio gear and then cover it. I mean if you think about it there are going to be some difficult tasks to get done post covering if you don't have this stuff in place first. Some are:

Installing reciever and routing antena.

Routing servo wires and getting them pluged into the reciever.

Routing battery pack and switch components.

I mounted my pack with double sided tape (3M mounting tape from the grocery store) to the balsa battery tray, then hit it with some CA. After that I CA'd a couple of pieces of balsa next to the pack to essently keep it from moving if the tape failed. I flew my HW to the limit, crashed it several time's and never had a problem with the pack comming loose. You can also use the same method for the reciever.

That's my 2 cents, keep us posted, it sounds like your relly comming along with this one.

Darren