An update on the first test flight. Sunday was a great day, very light winds. I fueled it up and thought I did a good pre-flight, but under the cowl I missed something - the throttle linkage was not hooked up! It happened on Sat when I took the engine out to put on the exhaust deflector. So after cussing myself - I took the cowl off and reattached everything. By that time Stallwart showed up with his H9 T-34. Wow, maybe we'd be able to do some formation flying. Fired up the plane and taxied out to the runway. This is a grass runway, so I knew with the small wheels it would take a pretty good run to get airborne. I advanced the throttle and got about five feet, then the nosewheel collasped. I broght the plane back to the stand and took a look at the nose gear. In the back of my mind, I knew that I would end up replacing the retracts with Hobbicos in the near future, but not on the first flight. After looking for the failure, it was the T-Bar had pulled out the nylon housing. A little bit of muscle and it popped back in. Fired her up again and taxied out. This time I was trying to get a running start, 10 foot, the nosewheel collasped again. Same problem, so she did not fly - maybe in a couple of weeks when I get a new nosewheel retract unit installed. As for Stallwart, his nosegear also acted up and niether of us got to have a formation flight. I was able to fly my 60 size Spitfire!

Conclusion - as a guessed, I should have replaced the retracts from the start. This is not the first set of weak retracts I had from various ARFs by different manufactors and not the last. The mains should be fine, but not the nosewheel. Other than that, until I fly the plane I cannot tell if it has any bad habits or not.