On to the fuselage, and the gear mounting plates.

The plates that came with the kit are made up of two laminations of 1/4" ply. Nice & sturdy, but the problem that I found was that the slot in these plates (that the retract unit mounts into) was a good 1/8" wider than it needed to be - not sure how clearly that can be seen in the pic below.

If you look at the position of the mounting screw-holes in the retract unit, you will see that they aren't all that far out form the frames. This means that once that extra 1/8" gap is taken into account, the screw holes are going to be so close to te edges of the cut-out slot that there really isn't a huge amount of meat left. Now, anyone who knows me understands that my landings are always such perfect greasers that I don't need to worry about whether the gear screws will get pulled out of an unnecessarily compromised mounting plate. However, I will probably have Dave "Strawboss" Presta do the maiden flight on this bird,so I need to make sure that the mounts are up to HIS standard too, not just mine !

So, I simply used the provided mounts as a template, and made up new mounts that have a much tighter fit and more meat for the mounting screws.