I know that you cannot please everyone and those who buy a value priced plane should not expect it to be perfect. Furthermore, with a value product you should expect to require some upgrades out of the box. I bought my P-51 Nitroplane with this clear in my mind. I planned to upgrade hardware and I knew the manual was far from perfect thanks to this forum. I overcame the manual problem by downloading the very similar Hangar 9 manual (which is excellent). I am not here to bash Nitroplanes or vent because there is a place for their product. I will however share my expereince so others know what to expect:

1. The manual is very bad. Overcome this by downloading the Hanger 9 manual.
2. Don't expect any support. Nitroplanes does not return phone calls or emails. (At least not mine) This must be one way they keep their prices so low.
3. You get what you pay for:
- The covering is low grade and poorly applied.
- A lot of things don't fit right so expect to do a lot of sanding and cutting.
- You might not get all of the hardware (I didn't). This is OK because you will probably want to upgrade anyway.
- My canopy was scratched so bad from vibration in shipping that the top is translucent not clear Hangar 9 sells a nice replacement that seems to fit.
- The retract wells do not cover the entire retract. This is OK if you don't mind a bunch of dirt in your wing. I ther****rmed a patch for this.
- You will definately want to replace the engine mounts and reinforce the firewall for a big 4 stroke.
- The fuel tank mounting leaves a lot to be desired. Expect to buy some balsa to build this up to keep the tank from moving around.
4. Be sure to measure and re-measure everything. The lines on my firewall were off by .3 inches. Mounting my engine referenced to the lines would have been disaster.
5. Check the structural integrity of the fuselage.
- My fuselage had broken or unglued joints.
- This can be fixed with a syringe feeding 30 minute epoxy through a long tube and inspecting every joint with a small mirror and penlight.

In my opinion, buying a Nitroplane kit is a tradeoff in time versus money. I have put together similar kits in about 6 hours and maybe 1 trip to the hobby shop. The Nitroplane took 18 hours, 4 trips and about $80 more than I normally spend on a kit like this. When all said this P51 will have cost me about $230. The Hangar 9 is $254. I will save about $24 making my time worth about $2 per hour (not counting the trips to the hooby shop).

She will fly this weekend. I will let you know how she flys.