After 3 months of not getting anywhere near my toys (that dreaded day-job thing), I finally got some time last weekend to start rigging the aircraft out after having done hte paint. (Though I still need to figure something out on the finish, since I have one glossy wing and one matte one, etc., thanks to some odd behaviour from the 'flex-n-flat' paint.
I spent several hours fussing with the retracts. Two of the brass tubes that are attached to the main cylinders (in place of traditional nipples) were leaking air past the join, and then when I did get the retracts working, two or three cycles later one of the mains would stop working. I found that it was leaking air past the pushrod, and after pulling the cylinder apart I found that the small o-ring that fits around the pushrod and is supposed to form a seal there was travelling up and down with the piston instead of staying in place in its small recess. There's no lip etc to hold it in place, so even when I pushed it back in place it came out again an hour later (I'm now an expert at getting the gear in & out in record time). I eventually applied a tiny speck of PIC plasti-stic CA to hold the o-ring in it's recess, and that seems to be holding out for now.
[ Note - see post 253 :
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=4340159 for a possible cause of the o-ring repeatedly dislodging ]