I'm building my first ARF (Wattage Cessna 182) and am having a lot of trouble. It looked pretty straight forward once I got it, but it seems to be such an imperfect model I don't know what to do.

What I am having trouble with is getting everything to fit (and be straight!). I'm not sure if this is common to all models, or is mine particularly difficult. Obviously, I'm new to this, but I think I should be smart enough to handle this model.

I'll try to keep this simple and focus on one issue. After struggling to get the ailerons on and the wing halves together, it was time to mount the wing. This is so you can set the placement of the horizontal stabilizer before epoxy. But I couldn't get the wing to drop-in to the saddle very well. It is too long from front to back to fit in the recess in the fuselage. You can see it here with the left arrow (the right arrow shows another issue. That is, the ends of the ailerons don't both line up with the trailing edge of the wing at the same time. Only one end will line up at any given time).



I trimmed as many places as I could see that might be causing the wing to bind, but it only just allowed me to get the wing bolts through the wing and into the fuselage. But now that I try to line up the stabilizer, it is not parallel to the wing when viewed from the front. You can see it here.



As you can see there is almost a half an inch of difference on the two ends (maybe more). The instructions say to shim it until it is level with the wing, but that doesn't seem to be enough.

So having shown these two or three problems, I guess I am asking what I should expect. Is this normal? Everything about this model seems to be so imprecise (is that a word), that I can't tell which is the cause of the problem. For example, maybe the wing is not level, but the stabilizer is. Do you know what I mean?

So, what should I do? How can I fix these problems, or which ones can I ignore if any? Obviously, I can't ignore the angle of the stabilizer, but I am hoping the other things might not have caused much more than a drift from straight and level flight.

Can anyone that has more experience than me shed some light on what I am going through? My build is on hold for now. Any advice would be a tremendous help!!

Thanks!! Andy