Boddingtons, that was the brew, it almost made the night a total waste. But I know where your comeing from on the "getting bored" aspect, I felt that way with the pulse, just had something not right about it, didn't seem to do the moves like you told it to do. Didn't matter how or where you shifted the cg or the throws, the plane is only going to be a second stage trainer no matter which way you slice it. The little blocks are for my hinges, weather I go with CA, robarts or klett style hinges, it gives it a little more wood to bite into and not let go. An absoloute must for robart hinge points.
As far as the RCV, it's the CD model, the regular RVC is good, but they suffered from overheating, due to the way the cooling fins were made, air tends to skip over them, because they are 90 degrees to the air flow, the CD model is your traditional setup, the cylinder still rotates, except they are using the crank as the power take off, not the 2:1 cam reduction. So it has no valve cover, just an upper bearing. So it will hide inside the cowl of the skybolt, but it's a heavy piece of aluminum, they say 24 ozs w/muffler. But it feels alot heavier, and you have to offset the engine mount lower by 3.6mm, due to the bolt together case. But everybody says it's a great running motor. I guess I'll find out soon enough.
For the extra, I'm running a good old .40 GS supertigre w/pitts muffler, std servos all around and keeping it as light as possible, I'm watching the weight as I go, wiping off excess glue, picking light componets and only adding extra wood where needed to make it live through abuse. So far, the longest part of the build is going to be the covering portion, but that's just me, I want to apply it once and try my hardest to avoid having to come back to reshrink it in the future. But now-a-days, I here that most plastic covering materials are worthless, I use to prefer monocote, but if what's on my ARF skybolt is the new monocote, no freakin thanks, I'll use seran-wrap before appling that, ultracote is ok but has it's issues with not bonding strong with the adheasive. Man just give me some of the old goldberg supercote or super monocote and I'd be in heaven with plastic stuff again.
I've been kinda busy puttinig together parts of the skybolt, so no progress on the extra, but it sure does make me appriciate a kit built plane over an arf, I have seen the quality of arfs go from bad to pretty good, but now that all manufactures are trying to be price-point, the quality of the covering and structure assembly has been lowered again to questionable. You know, years ago, I use to assemble Arfs for 2 hobbyshops, just for customers, so I've assembled quite a few in my life, and there were only about 2 or 3 that seemed decent. But I've only owned about 4 Arfs that I thought were good enough to make the cut. One of them is the H9 Cap 232, in my avitar, the GP 1/3 Pitts & the Herr lil' extra. Besides hardware preferences, that was the only issue I found, the GP pitts was the only Arf that I used 90% of the supplied hardware due to it being good 4-40 sized hardware. This is why I build, I know the plane is solid, built properly, balanced laterally, covered nicely and the hardware is hand picked and intergrated into my build. Generally. I find my kit built planes seem to take more abuse, look better and retensioning the covering isn't on the list of maintainence.