It went in gliding. Like in a turn only at idle. The wingtips on one side caught the wheat and it came around to hit the spinner first. As I described above, it didn't hit hard enough to mess up the cowl. But the firewall got it's ticket punched. I've not ever seen even a bad landing where the cowl took almost no damage but the firewall failed. And failed like this one did.

Nope, not hard at all. The cowl came through. It actually stopped the engine being pushed back farther and causing any further damage. How hard could that hit have been. It was about like a couple of the bounce-in's that happened that day that broke props. And they happened on the runways without the cushioning of the wheat. Of course, the spinner was dirtied up enough to show that it hadn't been cushioned worth spit.

Don't feel sorry for me. I've got it about halfway rebuilt.... and re-engineered. It's too nice a bird to not rebuild it. I've been building and flying models since the late 50s and usually disect them completely to see how the construction fared, but only when they're not worth rebuilding. This one is certainly worth the time and energy. Also, it's about $300 worth of model, without counting the servo's etc. So it's worth the money to rebuild also. I'm actually happy that I got to see inside the nose. It's getting an additional structure or two above the tank area to support the top of the new firewall from the back. The sheeted foam is all that's up there from the mfg. Now there will be more. My airplanes usually live very long and busy lives. Now this one will have a better chance of wearing out some engines for me.