I've been looking at that Zero for awhile now. I really want a 46 size one bad! But I really don't care to have a "scale" one as much as I'd like to have a flyer that just looks scale. I want something pretty much like the KYOSHO P40 turned out to be. It's got all the dimensions right but they didn't bother with any small detail and they did make it light.

That AKM Zero looks very good. It looks to be very scale. But it's weight is a bit toward "scale" and away from "flyer". And it's got a fiberglass fuselage. For this last year, every fiberglass airplane I've seen come out of China was like china.... dishware that is. Every model I've seen with a glass fuselage is now gone..... completely. If the crash was bad, not a bit of the fiberglass lived through it. A B25 that was all glass hit moderately hard and even the parts that should have come through were trash. A couple of off field landings that were just that, landings, tore up cowlings that only hit glancing blows. So every incident I've seen that involved fiberglass wound up with the fiberglass part breaking some or completely.

It looks to me that all the different damages show the same symptoms. All the fiberglass work looked like the gelcoat was hardly attached to the glass cloth underneath. And the cloth looked completely dry at that interface. It is very obvious that the "factory" workers aren't very adept making sturdy glass parts. But those parts do look excellent. They're beautiful. But those workers are pushing for volume. They're waiting too long to lay up the part after the gelcoat. And they're not getting good wetting on the first glass into the molds nor attachment of the glass to the exterior coat.

I wouldn't buy a fiberglass fuselage ARF today, and I don't crash often. I don't usually even land hard. I landed an EFlite Mini Edge on tall grass the other day. I'd taken the gear off because the sucker was so lousy on the taxiway. The landing was perfect and the plane just slid. And it was such a decent landing that I wasn't sure exactly where the touchdown point was and the slide was way longer than I'd anticipated. When I went over and picked the sucker up, the bloody fiberglass cowl looked like junk on the underside. The BLOODY GRASS had been enough to crack it just about everywhere. And every bit of the cloth was dry as could be on the gelcoat side.

I don't know a thing about how good or bad the fiberglass work is in that AKM Zero. But I'm going to wait and see. I've tried to talk a buddy into buying one..... chuckle..... 'cause I really would like to have a Zero....