Barry,

Amen brother, well put

It's great for those lunch time flights as it takes somewhere around 5 minutes to get it ready. But a royal P.I.A. for transport. I have a Ranger shortbed so the wing sticks out over the tailgate a few inches.

As you are finding out as you lean the engine, you'll get less oil spots. At 50:1 you will always have some and at 32:1 you will have even more. On the DA-50 in my Cap, I'm long into 100:1 and I only wipe the plane down after every 5th or 6th flight and then I could go longer if I wanted to (and have at times). I have been using rubbing alcohol to clean planes since my glow days. It's fairly cheap, you usually only need to apply it once and it does not leave any streaks.

As far the plane itself, I'm completely happy with mine. It's all trimmed and the mixes are done. About the only thing I have had to do is add 1 degree each in up thrust and right thrust to handle the bigger prop and I shaved about 1/16th of an inch off of the back of the wing saddle. Once I did these, I had to remove my mixes. I only needed 2% elevator at max rudder (all I can get) and that was to hard to mix out.

Mine is pretty stock with the pants installed, but not completely:

DA50
PT models 23X8 (turning 6700, 22X8 turns close to 7300 and is much better for 3D)
Pete's 3.5 inch CF spinner
Hitech 5945's on all surfaces
Hitech 5875 (I think that's the number) this servo is .08ms on 6 volts and gives great throttle response
Smart-fly Optical kill
SWB and Airwild servo arms
H9 Titanium control rods on the elevators and ailerons
Central Hobbies CF control rod on the rudder
Weight is 13.75 pounds

CG is very neutral. I pull a 45 degree inverted upline and let go of the sticks. I want to see the nose drop ever so slowly (slightly nose heavy, good for IMAC) or just continue in that position (neutral, good all around CG). If the nose pulls up I know I'm tail heavy. Mine stays in the climb without doing anything with a full tank.

I have gotten pretty good at doing KE spins with this plane. It winds up almost as tight as my Ultimate does . I did get it to tighten up once on a very rapid Waterfall with no altitude loss, but I have not been able to re-create that since []

As far as flying qualities, this has got to be one of the best Caps I have flown and I have flown quite a few including the Cap580. I went through a few deadsticks with this plane due to a clogged fuel screen in the DA's carb and quickly found out what a floater this thing is.

You can slow this thing to a crawl and not worry about it dropping a wing on low rates, even at the weight I am at. With the Da on the nose, I can do a 25 foot takeoff run, pull straight up and power right out. I do this quite often and I usually hear comments like "that plane is not lacking in vertical", etc...

With the trim changes I made, KE if easy as pie to fly, I need no stick inverted to just a touch when inverted (depends on how much fuel I have left), standard and advanced aerobatics are a breeze. You can easily do the Intermediate IMAC sequences with my plane, Lomecvaks (tumbles) are a blast. I do them climbing, inverted and upright. The climbing ones are nice but the inverted ones look the best and all look way better to the left which you would expect since this is a high stress gyroscopic maneuver that is know to remove engines from mounts/firewalls and snap wings off

I'm not much of a 3D person but I do fly with whaturi and as you saw in his video, 3D is a none issue with this plane.

The only real problem I found on this plane is this:

The plane whaturi has is my first one which he fixed. I went into a blender/flatspin and it deadsticked using the Fuji43 (not the engines fault), I came in too hot and had an off field excursion. It never really hit that hard but the front just snapped off just like I took a saw and cut it off. The wing had a very slight dent in it at the root and the cowl was scratched. A quick look revealed little to no glue holding the F1 former in place. I sent pics to GP and the promptly sent a brand new plane.

Other than that one issue this plane has held up well to my abuse. Granted not 3D abuse but many high stress things like the tumbles, waterfalls and KE spins.