I happen to like ARFs and what they contribute to the hobby, but truth is, what good is a magazine build article on an ARF? Jeez, they come with an assembly guide. And you get almost nothing more from magazine articles than another assembly guide. Oh yeah, and a lot of heated rhetoric about how excited the assembler is and what a wonderful deal that ARF happens to be. Worthless.......
A couple of the ARFs I've assembled were also covered by major magazines. Those articles were truly worthless to me. You don't usually learn a single thing worthwhile in those things that wasn't better covered in the assembly manuals. And the manuals were usually written by someone to whom English is their 3rd or 4th language.
Getting past the redundancy issue, the magazine articles could be of value if the authors wrote their advertising copy a bit later than the day after the first successful outing. I have had two ARFs that had fatal flaws that didn't show up the on the first outing. One of them had way too weak materials in the fuselage aft the wing. It was basically 1/4" balsa longerons back there. They were failing by the 5th or 6th flight. And another ARF's wing joiner and the bulkhead it went into were absolutely insufficient for the intended use of the airplane. The lousy plywood used in the wing locating tab was basically one ply plywood.
It was actually 3 ply. The center one had veneers on either side, basically. And the primary wood was little more than hard balsa. It wasn't balsa, but wasn't much stronger. And that's what was in the fuselage bulkhead the wing tab inserted into. And the wing tab was made up of two pieces of the same junk. On the 2nd outing, I noticed the wing was loosening up in the front. Both the bulkhead and wing's tab were crushing each other when the wing was stressed. You'd think the manufacturer of a Sukhoi 31 model would have the sense to know that wing connection was going to see some stressing.
And I've got an Ultimate that has a very important structure that is also somewhat unique to the model. A recent review didn't even mention it. No pictures. No words.
Guys used to read magazine build articles to read about the design details, the whats and whys. And you looked for mention of different building techniques to be mentioned. And they were. You learned how to build and design from them. What do you learn from what amounts to nothing more than a few pictures and a glowing report of whether or not the covering was wrinkled?
Yeah, today's ARF assembler isn't reading to learn shop skills or design skills, but that's not what he COULD get out of those magazine articles. And truth is, he's getting almost nothing..... other than another dose of advertising.
What's really a joke is the chest-thumping some magazines do about
"using the supplied hardware". Like that gives real insight into the quality of the stuff. I've yet to see any hardware that won't last for a day or two.