ORIGINAL: MHester

Hey Mike, just fly one next time you get the chance....and have a really close look at how it's built. You Chicago guys have all the necessary ingredients: skill and an actual building season

The plane goes together like lightning. I'd say 60% of the work is just sheeting the cores, which is nothing out of the ordinary. Building the fuselage and assembling the plane is probably only 10% of the work...the rest is in the details and finish. There is just nothing hard at all about these planes. I'd say it's no more work than building a composite kit. Maybe only slightly, depending on the quality of the composite kit in question. In some cases, MUCH less. FWIW I can frame one in less than a week, ready for finish. 4-5 days if properly motivated with do distractions...

The really nice thing in my opinion is that while I prefer glass and paint, I kept the shapes designed with an easy monokote finish in mind. Even the fin transitional area isn't too radical.

My thought was to try and break the stigma of what a wood plane was. My previous experience was with Typhoons etc. WAY too many parts for my taste. You could build 10 of these in the time it would take to build one Typhoon. The other one was somehow wood planes got the reputation of not flying as well as the top of the line latest and greatest composite overseas jobs. In my personal opinion, that has been totally reversed. Most of THEM don't fly as well as the VF3. And the ones that do, add a 25 mph breeze and watch the difference....that part has to be seen to be believed. If/when I discover why that is, I'll let you know...I plead luck. But it was a pleasant suprise!

Not saying it's perfect, but it's certainly not a compromise on any level. That was the whole idea....an option to what else is out there.

Don suprised me, and I admit I'm a bit flattered. he flew it after the Huntsville contest, and seemed to like it. 2 days later I got a call that he was in Atlanta and wanted to fly the plane some more, so I met him at the field. He wrung it out through everything we could think of. I asked him to tell me if he felt anything that might could stand improvement...nothing. he said it was a good, honest airplane that did everything he told it to do, predictably. And he made it look GOOD. Beyond that you'd have to ask Don, but when he asked me how to get one, I told him I was buried in work and he would have to build it...and he said sure. Judging by his pics and methods so far, he's not going to have ANY problem. I will see to it that he has another one built by me by the team trials. If he flies even as well as he flew the red plane at GMA, he's going to be one to watch this summer, and has just as good of a chance as anyone else I've seen. Would that not be really neat for the grass roots of US pattern?

So, that coupled with a few suprises I know of, this is likely to be a great year for the US pattern plane makers and the guys that fly them. Great and exciting times, my friends!

-Mike