I too came back one year ago after 10 years away from the hobby. At first I was pretty excited about the ARFs that were available. But I soon figured out that to have them built to my specifications I basically was stripping them down and reinforcing or redoing most of the work. After doing this several times I decided that I might as well build the whole thing myself. There are many threads on this site about structural failures and 95% of them are ARFs. I've never been concerned about the structural integrity of a model I've built myself.

Having said all that, they do allow people who would never have the time or spend the effort on a kit build to fly RC models.... And that's the point. I do wish there were a few more kit builders.

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