Been in a UPS hub or two some years back when riding front seat with a major air freight carrier. Made my hair stand on end when I saw the way they "handle" packages. Meaning as few hands as they could lay on a package an still get from one point to another.

On closer examination mine did not make it as unscathed as I had thought. Found a place on the right side aft fuselage where something had managed to poke through the box into the side sheeting. It's in a non critical area and small enough where a 1/2" "dot" of covering will hide it with no notice.

Cowl Attachment, of note:

Finally sitting down with the plane for a good look-see and I noticed there has been a change in the way the cowl attaches between the 35% and 28% birds. The construction between the two is so similar it's scary! That's a good thing, BTW. The 50cc plane has a couple of wood "hooks" at the bottom of the cowl to set the cowl down into. This is addition to the upper cowl attach screws. This is very nice and should prevent a cowl from dropping down into the prop if the upper screws were to fall out. With this feature the cowl CANNOT drop lower than when it installed prior to flight. It just can't! You have to line the cowl up a little more accurately when you slide it in place but it's not at all difficult. If I can do it anyone can do it, and it only took me twice to figure it out Reduces the fastener count in the cowl attachment as well.

In the pics you can see where the cowl fits into the fuselage hooks. This one was a little snug and left the cowl sitting just a touch high in relation to the top of the fuselage. The correction is very simple. I used a small, 1/4" wide rasp to adjust the fuselage hook depth a little bit. Took about 2 minutes. BTW, snug is good. That's one of the things that keeps the caowl from dropping down should the screws ever loosen up. You want snug.



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At the moment I'm still making up my mind on the cannister cut out and fiberglass insert. For those that will be using cannisters it's a very nice feature but I'm one of those that still only needs a muffler at the places I fly. More on this later as I ponder it more thoroughly.