So for xmas I received a Top Flite Staggerwing ARF with retracts and a Saito 1.80. I spent a couple days working on it and here's what I have found so far.

The quality is very nice, I'm impressed for an ARF. There were LOTS of wrinkles in the covering but they came out with some patience and the heat gun. The retract door mechanism works pretty easy, didn't take long to set that up either.

There are a couple things that bother me though.

1. I read about the wing dowel alignment problems on the lower wings. It appears top flite corrected this on this kit as you could see where the old holes were plugged and new ones drilled, they lined up perfect with the fuse BUT..........
The aluminum spars would not allow the wing root to match the mating wing root. The actual wing leading edge was 1/8" lower than the root on the fuse. They both fit with negative incidence, not a good thing! Low at the LE and high at the TE. With some careful filing I managed to get them to line up and have the incidence be correct but what a PITA!

2. The lower wings have washout, but sadly the flaps do not, they are built dead flat, as a result, when they line up at the wing root, they are about 1/8" low at the tips, cosmetic mostly but still kind of dissappointing. The wings aren't warped, both are identical, as are the flaps.

3. The tail wheel doors suck, they are so warped and twisted they'd never match up correctly, I got them pretty close with heat, but not perfect.

4. The main gear doors work well and it was easy to get them to fit and close correctly, but it's to bad they didn't mold them with the lower wing airfoil so they actually flowed with the airfoil. Again, some work with the heat gun got them closer, still not perfect but closer.

5. The left landing gear mounting rails weren't quite level with each other, when I mounted the retract, when all 4 bolts were tight, the gear bound and would not go up or down, some shimming on the rail cured this, but again kind of a pain. I wish that manufactures would put blind nuts into retract mounting rails instead of using wood screws though! The fixed gear mounts match the hole pattern of the robart retracts, wouldn't be tough to have the holes drilled with blind nuts in there so the wood doesn't strip out after a couple of times in and out.

That's about as far as I've gotten so far, the plane is at my parents house (where I got it during my christmas holidays) so I won't be working on it again until February 9th when I head back there again. I'm really excited about this plane, it will be a great departure from turbines, just wondering if others have had the same issues in their kits and what else I should look out for while continuing the build.

Jeremy