Hi Ron,

Yes I have engines purchased already, I have a GMS 1.20 for the front and a Super Tigre .90 for the rear both 2 stroke. I upped the size of the engines from what the plans for two reasons. First I live at a higher altitude, over 6100' and since the thin air will rob power I increased the size. Second Gary over at Wings of the Web discussed in his video how the version he built which was a 71" wing span was under powered with the engines he selected. He claims he has not been able to fly his in a number of years since his air field was closed because his club no longer has a field long enough for take off. the larger size has caused me to rework the firewalls slightly and I will talk about this when I post the pictures of the engines after mounting.

As for retracts I have been talking with Robart and it looks like I am going to be using their 635 series retracts for large scale aircraft. They have a 110 degree nose retract now which is only 5 degrees short of what the actual plane rotated through. The real plane had a slightly longer nose strut providing a small amount of upward angle in the front as long as I make sure the nose strut is longer than the main struts I should be able to match this. The upward angle of the nose will help in getting the thing off the ground but to much angle and I risk dragging the tail rudder on the ground which by all accounts was a major issue for Luftwaffe pilots and a driving reason behind the two seat trainer version of the Do.

I resized some additional pictures tonight and I am including them, these photos do not catch up to where I actually am at in the build yet.

One problem I ran into while building the upper fuselage was the formers appeared to have been cut wrong for the crutch or the crutch that the fuselage formers glue to had a mis-print in the size it should have been. The fuselage formers fit very loosely over the crutch and only made contact on one side of the crutch, so I added shims to the other side so that I had more surface to gule the formers to the crutch. What I did not know and there was no information to the fact was that the 1/16 piece of ply that runs from the front firewall to F15 was so slip up into the left over space that was left by the formers and the crutch. So when I pulled the upper fuselage off my building board and began to mock up the lower portion I had to break out my Dremel and cut out my shims.