I've had a lot of fun with the Great Planes Super Skybolt ARF in the last few months. When I saw the advertised weight it floored me. I'd seen a bunch of the kit built ones and had never seen a one of them that I'd call light. So I'd never even considered building it from a kit. So when I saw it advertised at 7lb 12oz, I jumped on it. And since I'd seen how the 9lb kit ones had flown with 60size engines, I never even considered installing anything more than an OS61FX.

And mine has been excellent. Up until the other day when I was trying to do inverted flat spins and went blind in one eye. Like an idiot, I tried to blink that eye into working again and didn't bother to bring the plane out of the spin. When it dawned on me that the eye wasn't going to quit hurting and start working the SkyBolt was about 1/10 mistake high. So I let go the sticks and started to fly it out inverted. And discovered I had no idea which way it was going. So I chopped the throttle and watched it "land sorta fast" into the mature wheat field that surrounds our flying field.

No worries, that wheat has cushioned lots of off field landings that're basically flat landings.

When I got to the plane it looked as I expected, just covered in wheat. Then the motor sorta grated around in the cowl some. And I noticed the cowl screws had cracked a little of the cowl around them. But the motor seemed very loose in the otherwise perfect cowl. And when I grasped the spinner I could push it in and out. Darn, I figured the motor mount had broken. But couldn't figure why any hit that had been hard enough to break the motor mount hadn't REALLY screwed the cowling.

When I started taking it apart I was amazed.

The motor mount had "die cut" the firewall. It had almost cleanly punched out the "plywood" firewall about as cleanly as Sterling kits were diecut back in the old days.

It turns out that the firewall on my SkyBolt is two layers of what I call veneer wood. Veneer wood is one ply of some kind of wood that then has a veneer of another kind of wood glued to each side. In the case of the SkyBolt's veneers, each one is about 3mm thick. The veneers thicknesses are basically not really measurable. OK, maybe .2mm thick, but I'm guessing. They're THIN enough that I doubt they offer much more strength than the glue used to veneer the three layers together.

It turned out that the impact of the "crash" was enough to "die punch" the firewall cleanly, but not enought to break the cowling. Now that firewall construction isn't what I call sensible.

If I were to assemble another ARF SkyBolt, I would glue an additional layer of plywood to the firewall. But after what I saw inside, I doubt I'll be assembling another ARF SkyBolt.