sgsterling, bryan is currently in portugal, so ill tell you what i know about the shinden as i fly one and practice with bryan every weekend....

Is your shinden a later or earlier batch? One of the wing fillets on the earlier mods of the shinden was slightly off (so dont align according to the wing fillet), but that had been fixed after the first batch or two. What incidence meter are you using? just curious...

for set up- yes gators should be fine. The shinden flies very well with .5 pos in the wings and cg on leading edge of wing tube;however, i realize set up is personal preference. This is the set up i flew at the nationals and it worked great. PM me if you need anything else, i dont believe bryan will be around a computer for the next 2 weeks. Hope this helps...