Rusty,

Thanks for your call to D.Guerin.

The wing is actually already floating somewhere further up in the fuse. I am determining how to finish the fuse bottom without loosing too much of the original scale appearance. The cowl rear bottom and wing TE location on the fuse are not at the same level which is something that is taken care of by the wing airfoil. With a higher wing, some compromise has to be met on how and where to break the angle of the fuse bottom. The easy solution is to just extend the fuse rear to the fuse front at the cowl junction but this might not be very elegant. Lowering the fuse at the wing TE (greater lower fuse aft angle) might also be a better way to preserve scale lines.

All this of course leads to the idea of plug-in wings which I'd prefer (for space constraints if nothing else). You mention that an alum tube helps with adjusting dihedral angle - how so? However, landing gear struts are mounted to the wing LE and the wing hold down plate in the fuse. If the wings are designed to be plug-in, I'm not sure that the tube would withstand the stress of a 10 lb model landing on the wing panel LE's!? I know this was done with early turnaround pattern designs which had panel retracts but they were located much further back. Any thoughts?

I was taking a look at the GP CAP EAGLE 580 EP (Matt Chapman's model) and see that the stab has been lowered to well below the thrust line. It is also moved back a tad so the stab TE is no longer inline with the fin LE. Angle cuts in the elevators are needed to clear the rudder. Both of these changes break the "scale" appearance in my opinion but I'm sure that the rearward stab position smooths elevator response somewhat.

The GP 27% CAP 232 has a slightly higher stab position (still not scale on the "fuse top" where it should be) but it is in the correct rear/aft position. So, with that brief analysis, it seems that Dave's recommendation to leave it in the scale rear/aft position and lowering it to the thrust line stays within a 15% TOC deviation (for what it's worth) while maintaining scale appearance.

As far as the wing goes, I will probably locate it higher up in the fuse at the equivalent % stab departure from its scale position. This seems like an even scale departure for flying surface locations.

I look forward to any feedback on these comments.

David.