I flew my Kavalier yesterday. I have a Saito .56 on it. It is still an extremely well flying plane.

I recently retrofitted a pattern plane to dowels for push rods. It flies great with them. Using dowels isn't much of a weight gain if you don't like the balsa.

On the Kav, I was tired of the single servo and torque rod system. You can modify yours like I did the Kavalier and actually save .1 oz over the Futaba 3004 servo and have dual servos. I enlarged the servo hole by 1/8" and put in two Hitech HS-81s. One for each torque rod. They fit side by side and I didn't have to do any other mods to the plane. It does fly much better. The servos run around $18 each.