George,

I completely missed your post last night. Thank you so much for your detailed information. I just figured I'd make it into a nosewheel airplane since the only pictures that I've seen of it are Bradford Lang's and his had a nosewheel. I've always loved taildraggers, and this airplane does look good in that configuration.

It has some sort of soft mount in it, I'm not sure if it's homebrew or was a commercially available product. It has glass filled beams with four rubber isolators on the back side of them. I've never seen beams that look like these. Back when I was flying OS 1.40 RX's, the vibration in those was not bad at all, and I have a hard time believing that a .61 would need to be soft mounted. As tight as the nose is, it looks to be a bit of a pain in the you know what to try and get a nose ring in there. I want to take a good look at the stab and see how it's glued in and see if some weight can be saved there. The wings are heavy as lead, and regardless of its landing gear configuration, I will be replacing those.

As of right now, the fuse is gutted, minus the stab and fin post. It didn't take too much work to get it to this point, so all of the gobs of glue that were in the airplane didn't do much good for the strength and longitevity of the parts installed.

All in all, I'm looking forward to working on it. I think it's a good looking airplane, and the fuselage is very distinctive looking.